OCR4all: Modern optical character recognition tool for old texts

Historians and other humanities' scholars often have to deal with difficult research objects: centuries-old printed works that are difficult to decipher and often in an unsatisfactory state of conservation. Many of these documents have now been digitized—usually photographed or scanned—and are available online worldwide. For research purposes, this is already a step forward. However, there is still a challenge to overcome: bringing the digitized old fonts into a modern form with text recognition software that is readable for non-specialists as well as for computers. Scientists at the Center for Philology and Digitality at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany, have made a significant contribution to further development in this field.

With OCR4all, the JMU research team is making a new tool available to the scientific community. It converts digitized historical prints with an error rate of less than one percent into computer-readable texts. And it offers a graphical user interface that requires no IT expertise. With previous tools of this kind, user-friendliness was not always a given, as the users mostly had to work with programming commands. OCR4all originates from the JMU Kallimachos project, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This cooperation between the humanities and computer science will be continued and institutionalized in the newly founded JMU Center for Philology and Digitality.

OCR4all is freely available to the public on the GitHub platform (with instructions and examples): https://github.com/OCR4all/OCR4all