HexRead

Delivery formats

Sources in, standards out

Which source material we handle, and the formats the result arrives in.

Six delivery formats fanning out from one schematic source.

  • Source
  • ALTO v4
  • PAGE-XML
  • TEI P5
  • JATS and BITS
  • METS and MODS
  • PDF/UA and EPUB 3
  • TIFF
  • JPEG
  • JP2
  • PDF

Source material

  • Fraktur, antiqua and mixed typefaces The antiqua passages inside Fraktur text are captured as markup, not swallowed.
  • Newspapers and journals Multi-column layouts, marginalia, tables, footnote apparatus, review sections with italicised work titles.
  • Microfilm scans Including low-contrast, stained or edge-damaged film (16 and 35 mm).
  • Multilingual sources German, English, French and further languages in the same volume; accents, special characters, Greek and Hebrew passages.
  • Special cases Genres with complex typography and multilingual settings, such as funeral sermons (Leichenpredigten), which standard mass OCR is not built for.

Our core business is printed text, including Fraktur. Handwritten material (Kurrent, Sütterlin) we assess on request via free test pages. Just include a sample page.

Delivery formats and standards

ALTO XML

Line and word coordinates, per-word confidence values; embeddable in METS (fileGrp USE="FULLTEXT") for the DFG-Viewer and presentation systems. Delivered in the version your delivery specification prescribes.

PAGE-XML

Per the OCR-D specification, compatible with ground-truth workflows, evaluation tools and post-correction environments.

TEI P5

On request DTABf-oriented, with typographic markup: hi rendition="#i" (italic), #b (bold), #aq (antiqua passages), #g (letter-spaced).

JATS and BITS

Article and book XML for publisher platforms, with per-article metadata down to the individual review.

PDF/A, PDF/UA and EPUB 3

Searchable PDFs with a correct text layer; accessible, tagged versions (PDF/UA, EPUB Accessibility) for offerings subject to the BFSG.

Encoding and validity

Unicode, special characters per MUFI and OCR-D; every XML delivery schema-valid. Optionally faithful to the source with long ſ and ligatures or normalised.

Free sample conversion

Up to 50 sample pages from your own holdings, ideally your hardest volume year. No obligation, result with an error-rate measurement within 5 working days.

Request a sample conversionHow we measure