On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 10:14 PM Stewart C. Russell via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2020-12-14 1:24 p.m., o1bigtenor via talk wrote:
Almost wet myself when he started moaning about Fraktur - - - -
And by that, I meant Sütterlinschrift — I couldn't remember the name, and now the more I think about it, it's a Kurrent variant, not Fraktur.
The individuals that used this script were not, by today's standards anyway, highly educated likely having at most 6 years of formal education. What is fascinating to me is that you could actually use OCR on both their script and those that used the newer script forms - - - - the handwriting was just that consistent. Unlike today a great hand was considered the mark of an educated person.
Though talking of Fraktur: Tesseract is amazingly good at recognizing Fraktur. Google got a lot of research cash to digitize old German municipal records.
Moving 250 to 400 years worth of records was far easier with usable tools. As you mentioned in your talk - - - there is little support for other typescripts. That's too bad!! I commented on your reaction to Fraktur largely because in the past short time I've heard Fraktur repeated described as 'unreadable' which is anything but true. Was an interesting talk - - - - thought the audience interaction was also quite useful although much of that was not easy to understand - - - perhaps that has changed subsequently? Regards