^{From Dream to Print}

Allow us to tell you more about the remarkable breakthrough in the Jewish publishing world; the scanning of ancient sefarim for the purpose of reprint.

Not so long ago, if somebody wanted to reprint a sefer, the sefer had to be painstakingly typed up, letter by letter, line by line, page by page.

The typed up work was, with rare exception, riddled with errors. The text had to be reviewed by several proofreaders in order for the errors to be caught and fixed, yet despite that, sefarim reprinted in that model contain many glaring errors. Sometimes, entire lines were skipped, resulting in a distorted interpretation of the original text.

Many sefarim were reprinted with lines missing from the original. Although proofreaders are tasked with comparing the typed up version to the original sefer, the work is tedious, and they would often rely on their own judgement; if the idea presented made sense, they would leave it at that. Serious mistake.  

And then, OCR software was born, marking the beginning of a new era.

^{What is OCR?}

OCR is a technology that recognizes letters and numbers that were scanned by a scanner, and converts them from an image, into a digital, edit-enabled file.

This is how it works: The computer software photographs the page and reads it, word for word, line by line. The software is smart; it knows when to move on to the next column, and when to turn a page, what continues from a previous section, and when a new section begins. It recognizes and reads everything – it doesn’t miss a single letter, including page numbering, titles, and any comments written in the margins. The software is an exceptional Talmid Chacham!

As the software “reads” the scanned pages, it converts the faded, sometimes partially erased letters into digital text, with remarkable speed and accuracy.  The material is now completely editable and can have words inserted, deleted, moved around, and replaced.

^{What Makes Machon Totzaot Unique}

As with many good things, OCR software is not entirely bug-free. Sometimes, it doesn’t pick up on the unique terminology of Torah expositions and it converts the ancient Hebrew used in Gemara and other Torah texts to modern Ivrit.

Rabbi Bransdorfer has developed a unique formula, he has upgraded the standard OCR software to one that is especially sensitive to the nuances of the Hebrew used in sifrei kodesh. It can distinguish between standard Hebrew and the Hebrew used for Torah works. It ‘read’ and converted the original edition of the Rambam into a digitized, reprintable version with virtually zero errors.  

Projects that used to take months of tedious, laborious work now takes several days, with near-perfect results. Machon Totzaot has successfully scanned and ‘read’ many ancient sefarim, some of which were even too illegible to be typed up. It has also been involved in several complex projects that had to go through many reviews in several different formats, until the required result was achieved.