Delivery formats and standards
Which source material we handle, and the formats the result arrives in.
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 italicized work titles.
- Microfilm scans - including low-contrast, stained or edge-damaged film (16/35 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 v4 and 2.0
Line and word coordinates, per-word confidence values; embeddable in METS (fileGrp USE="FULLTEXT") for the DFG-Viewer and presentation systems. We deliver in whichever version your delivery specification prescribes - ALTO 2.0, for instance, where the long-term archive does not accept v4.
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 / BITS
Article and book XML for publisher platforms, with per-article metadata down to the individual review.
PDF/A · PDF/UA · 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 (UTF-8 without BOM), special characters per MUFI/OCR-D; every XML delivery schema-valid. Optionally faithful to the source with long ſ and ligatures (ground-truth level 2) or normalized (level 1).
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.