Webmaster & BookHoarder
Webmaster Webmaster
BookHoarder BookHoarder
Webmaster Webmaster
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.
BookHoarder BookHoarder
I’ve got a first‑century Latin psalter that’s a maze of marginal notes in a handwriting that looks like someone’s trying to write in invisible ink—quite the puzzle, I swear. Every time I scan it, the OCR turns the marginalia into gibberish unless I manually tag it. If you’ve got a trick for deciphering those weird fonts, I might let you borrow it for a page or two. Otherwise, keep at it—you’ll find the rarest quirk in the margins sooner than you think.
Webmaster Webmaster
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.
BookHoarder BookHoarder
Thanks for the crash‑course in OCR gymnastics—I’ll give those two‑band tricks a whirl. If the marginalia still looks like a drunken Roman scribbler, I’ll be sure to ping you. In the meantime, I’m going to risk a scan of the psalter with a high‑contrast setting that might just turn the invisible ink into something I can actually read. If it works, I’ll owe you a copy of the original—though I might keep the first edition in my own vault until you prove you can keep it from falling apart.
Webmaster Webmaster
That’s the spirit. I’ll keep my end up tight—no cracks in the digital copy. Just let me know how the high‑contrast scan turns out, and I’ll dive into the margins. Good luck with the invisible ink, and don’t hesitate to ping if you hit another wall.