Hey, have you ever thought about digitizing your collection? I’ve been tinkering with OCR and metadata for rare texts, and it feels like a digital puzzle—especially when the scans get all the weird fonts and marginalia. I’d love to hear about the quirkiest book you’ve got; maybe we can troubleshoot the scanning issues together.

Sounds like a classic “invisible ink” case. First, flip the scans to grayscale and boost contrast—just enough to make the strokes visible but not over‑sharp. Then split the page into two bands: the main text and the margins. Feed each band to a different OCR model: a standard Latin model for the main text, and a fine‑tuned “handwritten Latin” model for the margin notes. If you don’t have one, try training a small model on a handful of your own marginal samples; even a few dozen lines can push accuracy up a few percent. After OCR, run a spell‑checker trained on classical Latin to clean up the nonsense. Give it a shot on a single page and see if the output looks less like a code jam.