Scanning of Old Handwritten Diaries

Question

OCR tends to work reasonably well on text, even block hand writing.However, a relative has just scanned in an ancestor's diary from the Boer War era in South Africa. It'd be fascinating to read.However, it's in beautiful but (to me) barely legible cursive.An example page: https://imgur.com/a/SJpyj94Are there any tools out there that might actually have a chance with handwriting like this?I tried a sample app I've worked on with OpenCV. It recognised there was "text" but that was about it.Google translate camera app gave me nothing.Word Lens (Same base code) as well.Is there one out there or a technique or suggestion anyone might have?

brudgers · Accepted Answer

Just transcribe it. A few pages a day and it will done before too long. That's what the Smithsonian does, so maybe it's even best practice.https://transcription.si.edu/

cerberusss · Answer

How many pages is the diary? I wonder if it isn't much simpler to brute-force it via Amazon Mechanical Turk and similar platforms.

rubidium · Answer

If you find anything post it here. Would also help with a bunch of deed records from 100 years ago.

pratikshadake · Answer

Going forward, you may wanna user reMarkable.