Ϯⲥⲁϫⲓ : The Coptic Language Text-To-Speech Seed

Been a long while since I’ve written anything here. In my defense, I've been changing jobs, getting married and relocating. All of these definitely took some toll on my spare time 😬.

Enough excuses, the latest project that I'm undertaking for fun is to make some sort of a TTS for the coptic language. I will definitely keep updating this article about its progress. 

For those who don't know, Coptic Language was the old language of Egypt before the Arab Settlement in the 7th century. Coptic’s bohairic dialect is still being used in our beloved Egyptian orthodox ( Coptic ) churches as the main liturgical language. The word Coptic is sometimes even used to name its members, so sometimes we're referred to as "Copts", though we just prefer to be called Christians.  

At the very start of 2021, I got contacted by Fr. Arsany —who's an expert on the subject matter — to add a TTS functionality to his team's digital Coptic-Arabic dictionary : Naqlun which is named after the Naqlun monastery in fayium. With all that history , I really thought this would've been implemented fully by now. To my shock and surprise, it wasn't !! . 

If we’re to create synthesis for a language, we’ll need to understand its phonology and have some high quality recordings for it. We don’t have the later unfortunately for the time being but we have most rules for the bohairic dialect that were passed generation to generation in our church. 

As we had to start somewhere, we thought to use the phonology we know to create a coptic-IPA map that will enable us to then pass the resulting IPA to an online provider to read. The idea was also confirmed when we contacted Prof. Amir Zeldes — who heavily studied Coptic and created the online Coptic dictionary. Prof. Zeldes also believed the idea can work.

As of the 19th of April 2021 , we’ve prototyped this Coptic-IPA mapping and published it on https://coptic-tts.web.app/ . It’s currently in review by linguists, and we’re on the way to open-source the project and publish as an npm package. We can also port this part to different platforms as needed.

All of our team is really excited and we really hope we’ll reach bigger and more elaborate milestones.

Thanks. 

B.L

New App : Pope117 - In commemoration of Pope Shenouda III

Today, with the help of my dear friend Ehab Magdy , I'm proud to announce the release of Pope 117 mobile application for Android and IPhone. The application serves an enormous library of Pope Shenouda III's publications,writings, sermons as well as audio and video content picturing him and his life since 1970. Pope Shenouda was one of the most distinguished and unique teachers and leaders of his time. His words of wisdom, guided by Lord Jesus, stay to give us patience and understanding of how to live to the fullest and still seek eternity and forgiveness for ones sins. His quotes, poems and articles bring all people together instead of dividing them over political whirls, extreme religious views or mundane concerns of day-to-day life. We're extremely happy and proud to have participated in such a project. We also thank our brothers at Prince Theodore Family (PTF) for their continuous support and sponsorship. The link to the android application is below 

cURL on Windows in only two steps

Hello and welcome. This is really a short post here, 

cURL is a very useful tool for interacting with web APIs and services. I just found that lots of students and friends refrain from following lots of steps to install such a simple CLI tool.

I depend in my proposition on chocolatey and a package created by their wonderful community, so the first step is to actually install chocolatey by the command below. If you already have it installed, skip to step two.

Step One
Run on cmd.exe as an administrator :

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"

At this time , you might want to close your cmd and reopen it , again as an administrator

Step Two

cinst curl -y

That's it, now from the cmd try

curl wttr.in/cairo

TaDaa !! and that would be the weather in Cairo.. It's getting hot in here 😆 .. see ya..

PDF24: The Easiest free tool to combine images into a PDF file on Windows

I wanted to join some scans into a single pdf , and they're all in png. My requirement is simple, I've got some images and i want to combine them into a single PDF. I googled out everywhere and the closest I've found was this article from this gentleman here for the excellent tool graphicsmagick . However, if you're not a CMD lover, you probably won't be fancying the idea of writing down all the images in the order you want them in the PDF. PDF24 gives you the image combining feature out-of-the-box and it takes you three simple steps.

1- Download PDF24 ,install and run (duh!), the interface looks like the following.

2- From the PDF , click the PDF printer assistant , and drag the images to the left pane like below.
Note that you can use the up and down arrows to sort the images as you'll like them in the final PDF.

3- Now , use the join button (the one with the infinity symbol ) . The program will join them into one item.

 


4- Finally , use the Save as PDF and choose the file location .

That's it , have a blast.