Improving the recognition of Dutch Gothic machine print, at four levels in the processing pipeline, in four days

Libraries and archives are struggling with optical character recognition (OCR) of old machine-print fonts such as Gothic or 'fraktur'. This font was used in many important historical printed collections such as administrative texts and the then (17th century) newly invented 'newspapers' with interesting and detailed reports on important developments and events. When applying current state of the art OCR tools or sending the scanned images to large well-known companies that provide OCR services, the returned results are still quite disappointing. Problems are observed at all levels in the proce... Mehr ...