Using notes in Legacy for wills - comments.
I want word processed copies of wills in order to put them into Legacy notes if I want to put them there. I have a copy of a literal transcription of a 1683 will and thought I would be smart to use that with OCR and would save myself some word processing time. Unfortunately, I didn't consider that the language in the transcription would make that almost impossible. OCR can't deal with fift (fifth), ffuller (Fuller), Compitent (competent), etc. Many of you probably have already dealt with this, but I thought I would share. It is hard to word process something like this because you yourself "want" to type the words correctly.
Judy Burns, I have not had the best of luck with that sort of thing. I usually open up Transcript or something and type away. I find I appreciate and see things during "manual" transcription that I might otherwise miss.
ReplyDeleteI got here by trying to comment on your library card posting on the NGS blog. You tell 'em! And make friends with your local librarians. They KNOW things.
ReplyDeleteBut while I'm here -- about transcribing: The wide pages of those old will books make it hard for me to keep my place on the page when I'm typing a transcription, even though I'm a touch typist, because I have to "slide" the image left and right as I type. So I have started reading them aloud into the dictation feature on my smartphone (the microphone button next to the space bar), usually into an email message that I address to myself. Then I open the message on my computer, copy and paste the text into the notes field of a source citation in my genealogy database. Usually it needs some "fixing up" to correct the phone's misunderstandings and to match the misspellings in the original.
Oddly, I understand the will much more quickly when I've read it aloud.
Hi Marian,
ReplyDeleteI also use Transcript as Carol suggested above. The image is in the upper part of the screen and you keyboard in the lower area of the screen. You can enlarge or reduce the image size so that would resolve your sliding the image left and right. Transcript is a nice little free software. Very simple to use. I use it for those old Colonial documents with all the strangely spelled words, etc. My original issue was regarding trying to OCR a transcribed well. Someone had already done the transcription and I simply wanted to digitize it in order to place it in Legacy or wherever. I understand your using voice recording and that's a great idea unless you are trying to preserve the exact spelling in an old document.
The problem with the wide pages is that reducing them to fit a normal
ReplyDeletescreen makes the writing too small to be legible. TRANSCRIPT won't help
that. So I increase the image size until the handwriting is legible, then
use one hand to move it side-to-side while I read it aloud into my iPhone.
Try it.
reading a document into a voice recorder is a smart idea - I did this for my niece recently (her class had an 1860s letter they needed to transcribe and none of them could read cursive! - reading aloud helped me understand the letter and I was surprised that the document needed little clean up. Excellent idea Marian Koalski (and it should make these projects easier). I do also use Transcript and that is helpful to have your word processing in sync with your document. Then just put the finished transcription/abstract in your Legacy file.
ReplyDeleteWe do love ALL these available toys, eh???
ReplyDelete