Software to help manual transcription?

[bugbear]

(as opposed to OCR, that is)

Does anyone know of a software product that would help me "tie up" a transcription and the original image as I proceed?

I'm thinking that the transcribed text perhaps might be an "in place" overlay on the image, or that the image and transcription would be in two windows that scrolled in sync.

In "difficult" texts I often lose my place :-(

  BugBear

[bugbear]

Here's one, at least:

https://blog.famicity.com/2017/01/champollion-2-0-the-scribe-for-savvy-paleographers/?lang=en

 BugBear

[bugbear]

Here's the "Transcript" software referred to by the previous one;

http://www.jacobboerema.nl/en/Freeware.htm

 BugBear

[bugbear]

This one appears to only work on its "own" images

http://t-pen.org/TPEN/

 BugBear

[arthurk]

There's also GenScriber, which appears to be similar to Transcript - http://genscriber.com/genapps/start

I've never used either Transcript or GenScriber, but I've kept bookmarks to both in case they might come in handy some time. For occasional use I've sometimes used an image viewer and Word in separate windows tiled on the screen so that I can see both at once.

[bugbear]

For occasional use I've sometimes used an image viewer and Word in separate windows tiled on the screen so that I can see both at once.

Yes - I'm currently using a simple viewer and a notepad type program.

But I'd like my computer to help me a little more. I'm a great fan of
computers doing work instead of me. 

 BugBear

[Mike Morrell (NL)]

The free transcription tool at http://www.jacobboerema.nl/en/Screenshots.htm looks interesting and I suggest trying it.

An alternative (page by page) solution might be to use a photo editing tool and type in a 'text layer' over the original document image (PDF, .jpeg, etc.). This is not something I'd recommend (it's an overkill) but depending on the types of documents you work with and what you want to do, it might be an approach to consider.

I attach a screenshot illustrating this approach with Photoshop but there are other (free/cheaper) tools that do the same thing . GIMP (which I use from time to time) is free and for typing in a text layer works the same as in Photoshop.

The steps are:
1. open or more separate document pages (PDF, .jpeg, etc.)
2. on each page (by page), click on the 'text' button. This opens a new ' text layer' above and separate from the original document.
3. draw a text 'window' on the text layer over the original document (or the parts you want to transcribe)
4. Type your transcribed text in the text layer 'over' the original document.
6. Save your 'work in progress' and final versions with the document and/or copy and paste your transcribed text to a different format (Word, website, etc.)

You can of course create multiple text layers (one for each section, or annotations) for a document page. By copying and pasting transcriptions from multiple pages into something like Word, you'll get a multi-page transcription in one document.

I don't do much transcription so I'm not sure how efficient this is. In the attachment, the original text is old Flemish. Again, this is not something I'm recommending, just pointing out that this kind of 'solution' is available too.

Mike

[arthurk]

An update to this:

There's also GenScriber, which appears to be similar to Transcript - http://genscriber.com/genapps/start

I've recently been transcribing a big document, which took several days, and rather than having to repeatedly tile Notepad and an image viewer in my workspace I decided to try GenScriber. I was very pleased with how it went.

It comes with a lot of templates for transcribing registers, censuses, etc, which it saves in spreadsheet (.csv) format, but in my case I just wanted text, which it saves as .rtf. (This is obviously better than Notepad because it can include basic formatting.)

I didn't try Transcript because it looks as though two useful features are available only in the paid version - the ability to highlight a part of an image (to mark your place) and a picklist or quick insert feature for often-used phrases. GenScriber, which is free, offers both of these, so it seemed like the one to try first.