#PDF Problems

[scribefindegil]

I love my partner for his kindness and devotion and also his academic journal access <3

[cowboy-heart]

also, i recently gathered all of my favourite poems (by other writers) into a single PDF for myself and decided to share it on my ko-fi!

it’s 106 pages, 62 poems, with an index, and links and credits to all the writers! and it’s free!

it’s a mix of published poets, blog excerpts, and internet poets, covering themes of love, grief, living, butch-femme, LGBT, nature and justice! - full list of contents in read more :)

it’s free since it’s not my own original work, but if you wanna tip for making the PDF then it’s much appreciated!! 🧡

(sidenote: if you/your work has appeared in this and you want it removed or edited, let me know and i’ll do so immediately!)

After The Threesome, They Both Take You Home’ - Sue Hyon Bae

‘Come, And Be My Baby’ - Maya Angelou

‘Witness’ - Crystal Wilkinson

‘lady macbeth-macbeth’ - @two-bees-poetry

‘how to spend an august afternoon in love’ - @cheruib

‘Chocolate Chip Pancakes’ - Caitlyn Siehl

‘The Teapot’ - Robert Bly

‘Little Weirds’ (excerpt) - Jenny Slate

‘Writing Prompts for the Broken-Hearted’ (excerpt) - Eden Robinson

‘Perhaps The World Ends Here’ - Joy Harjo

‘The Serious Downer’ - Jill McDonough

‘Summer Was Forever’ - Chen Chen

‘For Grace, After A Party’ - Frank O’Hara

‘A Vow’ - Wendy Cope

‘Laura, I Want You Pulling Your Hair Back’ - Natalie Dunn

‘Watching you talk on the phone, I consider the empty space around atoms-‘ - Rhiannon McGavin

‘Gram Loves You. Please Call’ - Amy Gotliffe

‘The Quiet World’ - Jeffrey McDaniel

‘the undone cowboy writes to his sweetheart’ - Silas Denver Melvin ( @sweatermuppet )

‘Song of the Anti-Sisyphus’ - Chen Chen

‘RURAL BOYS WATCH THE APOCALYPSE’ - Keaton St. James

‘A Possible Exit’ - Jarrett Moseley

‘poem on my fortieth birthday to my mother who died young’ - Lucille Clifton

‘ANSWERING HER QUESTION’ - Alice White

‘when the one you thought, finally, wouldn’t, does’ - Marty McConnell

‘fourth grader’ (excerpt)

‘Poem’ - Langston Hughes

‘For M’ - Mikko Harvey

‘A Drink of Water’ - Jeffrey Harrison

‘Cold Solace’ - Anna Belle Kaufman

‘Boot Theory’ - Richard Siken

‘Love letter as an autism diagnosis’ - Arden Kowalski

‘Tea’ - Leila Chatti

‘Night Walk’ - Frank Wright

‘Don’t Hesitate’ - Mary Oliver

‘For A Student Who Used AI To Write A Paper’ - Joseph Fasano

‘Rain’ - Raymond Carver

Unnamed/‘who’s afraid of hoverflies?’ - @a-chilleus

‘The Orange’ - Wendy Cope

‘Failing and Flying’ - Jack Gilbert

‘Can’t Get Enough Of My Love’ - Shuyler Peck

‘Invitation’ - Mary Oliver

‘Dead Rat’ - Mervyn Peake

‘Wild Geese’ - Mary Oliver

‘I Imagine The Butch’s Stripper Bar’ - Jill McDonough

‘FEMME SHARK MANIFESTO’ - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Unnamed (fake interview) - @llovely

‘Butch Please: A Letter To Baby Butches’ - Kate

‘ROUND TWO: the body as protest’ - Joelle Taylor

‘ROUND SEVEN: the body as uprising’ - Joelle Taylor

‘Angel’ - Joelle Taylor

‘Catallus 16’

‘15. Fan Letter’ - James Crewes

‘Make Out Sonnet’ - F. Douglas Brown

‘Hey Cowboy’ - Silas Denver Melvin ( @sweatermuppet )

‘Fat Top/Switch’ - Emilia Phillips

‘On a Night of the Full Moon’ - Audre Lorde

‘The Gardens’ - Mary Oliver

‘Want’ - Joan Larkin

‘Social Skills Training’ - Solmaz Sherif

‘Bullet Points’ - Jericho Brown

Unnamed - Marwan Makhoul

[girderednerve]

the treasury has been ordered as of today to cease production of the one-cent piece

there is a longstanding popular argument against the penny, which is almost exclusively about the cost of making pennies relative to their face value (they cost more than 1¢ to make, so the mint loses money on every penny struck). the problem of brassage (which i here use imprecisely to mean the cost of coining, rather than specifically mint fees) is very old, old enough that it's more or less contiguous with the cash economy in the west: there is tension between the practical needs of common people engaged in small-scale exchange & the cost to minting authorities to supply the small coinage those transactions require. i was interested in this problem as a medieval monetary policy question; despite the idea that monetary policy as an active matter was invented in the modern era & roughly coincides with the death of the gold standard, there were common debasements & reinforcements (that is, decreases & increases, respectively, to the bullion content of coins) for various reasons—mainly raising royal funds or improving currency circulation, but it varied. currency is never & has never been static, or the neutral condensation of exchange, or whatever; it's a political instrument. so who cares about the penny? let's save a little money. the problem that i see is that there is no initiative to adjust prices to make the penny obsolete at the cash register. the abolition of the penny in this haphazard way will result in a shortage of coinage that will affect people who are making small transactions in cash, which is why, incidentally, debasements were sometimes reasonably popular policy: people need money to do stuff. the argument that people no longer need physical cash to do stuff relies on the assumption that everyone is already receiving formal financial services from a bank & can just use a credit (or debit, but let's be real here) card, or i guess if you're a certain kind of weirdo the idea that we should all be using cryptocurrency. many people do not have access to these kinds of financial services, or choose to avoid consumer credit products for compelling personal reasons; also, these services interpolate another agent into exchange, which usually doesn't matter but sometimes matters a lot (consider, e.g., mastercard's position on pornography, or police access to bank statements), while cash transactions remain as a rule secure, anonymous, & independent. i have no emotional attachment to our particular coinage structure but if you are going to make it functionally impossible for people to pay with cash that's a genuine fucking problem?

[two-birds-alone-together]

Writing fan fiction and creating fan art is wild because, like... there's this dichotomy:

HBO, a company that will make a fuckton of money off a nine-episode show based on a video game:

We can probably overlook the anachronisms in the show because they're pretty minor. No one is likely to notice them.

Me, a human who primarily writes for herself and makes zero money off a nine-episode series based on a video game:

I must find a hardcopy or PDF of a readily-available dictionary that woud have been in a FEDRA school library because Ellie remembers the definition and page number of a paradigm-shifting word. Surely anyone and everyone who reads what I write will notice and call me out on it if the definition is wrong or I put an incorrect page number. Everything I write must be as accurate as possible.

Further proof that shows need to hire dedicated fans for continuity and anachronisms.

[finnlongman]

i hope this doesn't sound patronising if you've already tried that route, but in case you haven't: if this is a text that has been given to you as is and been produced by a general OCR, it might be worth looking into whether ppl have already trained language-specific OCR models for your field of study and using that to transcribe the scanned text again. there's a lot of transcription solutions/software and different fields prefer different ones, and idk the standard for Celtic studies personally, but a site i use often (transkribus) has 2 Irish models whose related projects you might be able to use as a starting point for research at least. best of luck to you either way!

So there are several factors at work with the OCR problems with this text specifically.

The PDF of the text is from Archive. The library copy it was scanned from has various pencil markings and annotations that are interfering with the printed text -- it's not a clean scan. It's also not super high definition, so letters like "h" sometimes get misread as "li", even though they're totally readable to human eyes.

The edition uses frequent italics and brackets to show where abbrevations in the manuscript has been expanded. Individual italicised letters confuse the OCR, as do random square brackets in the middle of words.

It also has a lot of superscript numbers corresponding to manuscirpt variants in the footnotes. Sometimes these are in the middle of a word. This also confuses most OCR systems, even if it can tell that the footnotes are separate from the main text.

The language of the text is late Middle / Early Modern Irish, from two different manuscripts that have their own unique spelling quirks (for example, one of them loves to spell Cú Chulainn's name "Cú Cholain", which is a vibe).

In order to run the text through a more sophisticated OCR system that was equipped to cope with a) annotations, b) weird formatting and punctuation, c) incredibly frequent footnotes (variants), and d) non-standardised spelling (which throws off many language models), I would probably still need to have a reliable, clear, and high-definition scan of the text. Which would require re-digitising it from scratch.

So, the quickest and easiest way to get a version of the text that I personally can use is to sit here and type up 20,000 words into a document. This is 2-4 days' work, depending on how focused I am, and gives me the chance to go through the text in detail and spot things I might miss otherwise, so it's probably a whole lot less effort for more benefit than trying to adapt an entire language model that could read this terrible PDF. Especially as I have no experience of using these programmes so would have a steep learning curve.

Now, somebody absolutely should do that, so we could get proper searchable editions of more things. But honestly, if using transcription tools for medieval/early modern Irish I think there are higher priorities than things already available in printed form, so I doubt it's at the top of anyone's to-do list!

[speedlimit15]

blazed neil gaiman post begging tumblr users to respect copyright law is the funniest thing i’ve read all morning

[milfvael]

just realized the original masterdoc for the company that laid me off's style guide is hosted on my personal google drive should I delete it

[sexygaywizard]

Please stop trying to nerdsplain to me what being a comp sci major is like I literally have an AS degree in compsci 😭

[scribble-dee-vee]

Hey hi hello, if u ever get a short story/op ed/byline of any sort posted in an online publication, save that shit as a PDF IMMEDIATELY

[databent]

does anyone wanna give me thousands of dollors for being sooooo sweets and cutes and nice???? 🥺👉👈

[dangerpronebuddie]

Wonderful day to scream at a robot.

[girderednerve]

did you know a new york public library card includes remote access to my other other favorite database OXFORD BIBLIOGRAPHIES?? because i just found out today & i'm very excited about it

[batwynn]

I am artist. No, I do not learn new habits. No, not even to benefit myself.

[girlcatilina]

die

[salamancers]

i did think it felt like my character was surprisingly weak - it turns out my pdf ate part of my character sheet and i didnt notice for several sessions -_-'

starting to remember why my other rp group uses google sheets lmao

[dragonomatopoeia]

while i love learning new things and reading about the formation of genres it does mean i end up having to look up even more things for context. neverending. anyway the first widely-read Gothic Novel was apparently printed as marketing material for the author to sell tickets to the cool house he remodeled to be a scary haunted mansion