Life & fun · December 17, 2024
Adventures in OCR
Hello HN! In a recent "Ask HN: What are you working on?" thread, I mentioned I was working on OCRing a large book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971614 The post generated some interest so I thought I would keep HN posted. The book is Saint-Simon’s Memoirs -- an invaluable historical account of the French court under Louis XIV, full of wit, sharp observations, and of incredible literary value. I'm OCRing the edition of reference made between 1879-1930, that contains a lot of comments and footnotes: 45 volumes, ~27,000 pages. Here's a link to a blog post that describes…
In plain words
Adventures in OCR is a project converting Saint-Simon's Memoirs, a 45-volume historical account of the French court under Louis XIV, into digital text using optical character recognition. The 1879-1930 edition contains approximately 27,000 pages with extensive annotations and footnotes. The creator has documented technical approaches on a blog and made the partially completed results accessible through a web application, allowing readers to explore the digitized historical text.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello HN! In a recent "Ask HN: What are you working on?" thread, I mentioned I was working on OCRing a large book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41971614 The post generated some interest so I thought I would keep HN posted. The book is Saint-Simon’s Memoirs -- an invaluable historical account of the French court under Louis XIV, full of wit, sharp observations, and of incredible literary value. I'm OCRing the edition of reference made between 1879-1930, that contains a lot of comments and footnotes: 45 volumes, ~27,000 pages. Here's a link to a blog post that describes the techniques used so far (the project is still ongoing): https://blog.medusis.com/38_Adventures+in+OCR.html But you may also directly access the result here: https://divers.medusis.net/boislisle/pub This web app (not optimized for mobile, sorry) solves a tricky problem of preloading images efficiently. In short: preloading the next image isn't enough, since browsers will repaint if an image is moved, or scaled. Or browsers won't paint at all if visibility is hidden or opacity is zero, and will paint only when those values change. On an average, slow machine, this takes visible time. But if an image is simply behind another element, it will be painted, and the removal of the covering element or changing the z-index will not trigger a repaint. (Preloading is important because it lets one review results fast; if one has to wait 150-200 ms between images it's simply discouraging). Would love to hear feedback; happy to answer any question!
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