
Fleuron: A Database of Eighteenth-Century Printers' Ornaments - FearNotDaniel
https://fleuron.lib.cam.ac.uk/index
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pmoriarty
A great idea. These would be super useful for reuse in typesetting my own
books using LaTeX, if only these ornaments were high quality SVG's instead of
low quality jpegs.

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gwern
The originals seem to be inherently low quality. Possibly an interesting tech
project here: try to automatically convert the JPGs into clean SVGs? Might or
might not require DL like GANs.

~~~
lioeters
From the project's About page [0], it seems a fair amount of ML/DL was
involved in creating the database.

"We developed a program to recognise printers’ ornaments and extract them from
the full page images into a new database."

"The approach adopted here is a morphological one. A series of morphological
operations (e.g. filtering, dilution, erosion, etc) is applied on each image
followed by a series of heuristics to filter out those connected components
that are deemed to be printers ornaments."

I followed the trail to the lead software developer, an expert in machine
learning and data science. In his past projects page [1], he described this
project under the heading "Image Processing":

"the problem was to automatically detect and extract printers ornaments from
millions of scanned 16th, 17th, and 18th century books"

If they would release the dataset of these rough-quality images of printers'
ornaments, perhaps someone from the public (i.e., open source) would be daring
enough to try generating SVGs. I know practically nothing about deep learning
(but curious and willing to learn :), but I'm supposing this wouldn't count as
"second-order machine learning"..

Edit: Further down the rabbit hole, there do seem to be some
promising/interesting work in this direction, such as "Conversion of Bitmaps
into Scalable Function Graphics using a Pre-trained Neural Network Database"
[2].

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[0] [https://fleuron.lib.cam.ac.uk/about](https://fleuron.lib.cam.ac.uk/about)

[1] [https://dirkgorissen.com/projects/](https://dirkgorissen.com/projects/)

[2]
[https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/67bc9f_358dcf74893e4021925ff0...](https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/67bc9f_358dcf74893e4021925ff0f8a618069a.pdf)

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reaperducer
If you don't specify any search parameters, the first result is a pair of
goats.

[https://fleuron.lib.cam.ac.uk/ornament/066740090000600_0](https://fleuron.lib.cam.ac.uk/ornament/066740090000600_0)

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purplezooey
This page is missing a "take me to a random fleuron."

