An Icelandic Primer
- Download PDF — version 1.0
- Download text — version 1.0
- Download TeX (zip) — version 1.0
- PG #5424 — version 1.0
The making of the ebook
I found the image files for this book at Sean Crist’s site (which has many other excellent resources, I might add) and downloaded them all. I then uploaded them one at a time to DocMorph to OCR them. The English text came out fairly well, but the Old Icelandic parts were unrecognizable.
For a while I used the ctrl-v u sequence to enter the Unicode characters (ctrl-v u 00fe to put in an eth, for example), but then I found that Vim’s digraph support for Unicode was much nicer. (Instead of using ctrl-v u 00fe, for example, I could just type ctrl-k d -.) That saved a lot of time.
After cleaning the text files up and comparing against the images, I collated them into one big text file and ran a proofing check, making sure all the paradigm tables were the same. Then I converted the text to HTML, using PHP to automate parts (the paradigm tables and the glossary, mainly). Finally, I proofed the entire etext against the images. After I finished the HTML version I converted the etext to Omega (a TeX package that sits on top of LaTeX) for output to a nice PDF version.
Special characters
| Character | Description |
|---|---|
| ¯ | macron (U+00AF) |
| ´ | acute accent (U+00B4) |
| ̄ [E.g. œ̄] | combining macron (U+0304) |
| ̈ [E.g. ǫ̈] | combining diaresis (U+0308) |
| þ | small thorn (U+00FE) |
| Þ | capital thorn (U+00DE) |
| ð | small eth (U+00F0) |
| Ð | capital eth (U+00D0) |
| æ | small ae (U+00E6) |
| ǣ | small ae with macron (U+01E3) |
| œ | small oe (U+0153) |
| ā | small a with macron (U+0101) |
| ē | small e with macron (U+0113) |
| ī | small i with macron (U+012B) |
| ō | small o with macron (U+014D) |
| ū | small u with macron (U+016B) |
| ȳ | small y with macron (U+0233) |
| Ā | capital a with macron (U+0100) |
| Ē | capital e with macron (U+0112) |
| Ī | capital i with macron (U+012A) |
| Ō | capital o with macron (U+014C) |
| Ū | capital u with macron (U+016A) |
| ę | small e with ogonek (U+0119) |
| ǫ | small o with ogonek (U+01EB) |
| ø | small o with stroke (U+00F8) |
| ö | small o with diaresis (U+00F6) |
| é | small e with acute accent (U+00E9) |
| § | section sign (U+00A7) |
Note that the combining diaresis and macron won’t show up correctly (they should be over the characters they follow).
Changelog
- 1.0 (24 Jul 2002): Initial release (PDF, text, page images)