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Dear all,
We are a small 2-person not-for-profit company called Rescribe working on OCR for historical printed works, such as you would find on Internet Archive and Google Books. So far we have primarily worked with academic research projects and libraries to provide transcriptions of collections of interest to them, but have always been invested in broadening our work to help individuals get high quality OCR results, too.
In recent months we have devoted more time to community-oriented open source software, developing a free desktop tool to perform high-quality OCR on modern and historic printed text. At the moment, this tool can only be run from the command line, but we’ve been encouraged by anecdotal feedback and a very positive independent review of our tool https://classicalstudies.org/scs-blog/hmcelroy/blog-review-latinocr-and-rescribe to make this tool more accessible. We would like to achieve this by creating a simple Graphic User Interface (GUI) for Windows, Mac and Linux, potentially with additional functionality built in.
As the focus of this work is on providing useful tools to individuals, rather than catering to a large project, we are interested in trying a crowdfunding campaign in order to finance the development of this GUI and get interested parties directly involved in the actual development process. Before starting the crowdfunding campaign itself, however, we would like to take a chance and gauge interest from potential participants. We’ve composed a 30-second, 3-question survey where potential participants can register interest and have their say on future features of the tool, see here: https://forms.gle/AZcKpsbzQQajSE4j6 Please fill it out if you have a moment, and forward it on to anyone you think might be interested.
In the meantime, any questions, comments and suggestions are all very welcome, either as a reply here, or to info@rescribe.xyz!
All the very best,
Nick + Antonia from Rescribe