After three months, I've been able to get back to eScriptorium. At this point, I think it's a reliable solution for creating the kind of digital texts I need in a timely and effective way. Being able to take advantage of the feedback loop from recognition to editing to training to recognition is a huge benefit. Some additional notes:
- I upgraded my old machine with a refurbished Nvidia 3060-based GPU, and it makes quite a difference. For a separate project, recognition tasks were sped up 6-10 times. For OCR, it made training with Kraken significantly faster, although I didn't measure it. Page recognition is much quicker. For around $200, definitely worth it - it doesn't just speed up one step, it makes it possible to test and experiment in a reasonable amount of time. I also experienced fewer hanging processes in eScriptorium.
- Docker crashed at one point and took everything with it. Not an eScriptorium problem, but making periodic backups or exporting XML is probably a good idea.
- But re-installation was easy. I did have to remember not to reinstall eScriptorium from git in a Windows command prompt, but from git in a WSL shell. I don't know why that makes a difference to Docker, but it does.
- eScriptorium does have a panning tool. You can right click and move an image around. However, there are limits in place so you can't move an image around when it fills the workspace. If you shrink the image, you can move it around the workspace at will. If you enlarge it, you can also move it around at will. But if the image is at 100% size, you can't move it at all. I still find this counterintuitive. Why can't I pan a 100%-sized image, but I can pan every other image size?
- I wish I could hold CTRL or SHIFT to toggle between scrolling up/down the screen, and resizing the image. Doing one when you mean to do the other is irritating. To scroll up/down the screen, you have to move your mouse pointer to a margin or gutter region.
- eScriptorium does let you select and delete lines and points in bulk, for example within a woodcut. Just hold down SHIFT, select, and hit DELETE. However, this only works if you don't have "Cut through lines" (scissors icon) selected. Why can't I select and delete lines in bulk when "Cut through lines" is selected? This is counterintuitive, especially since the first thing I would usually do after cutting through lines was deleting points and lines in bulk.
- To turn editing features on/off, you click on their icon. They change from blue to green. (Or is it from green to blue?) The mask button additionally cycles from blue to green to gray. Is blue on and green off, or the other way around? And the "Cut through lines" feature changes from yellow to green. Why yellow and not blue? And I still don't remember which one is on or off, even after many hours using the editing screen. This is, I think, not optimal UI design.
I wish the editing icons stayed on screen instead of scrolling off. When I'm editing the lower section of an image, it's an annoyance to need to scroll up to click on something. The web interface makes it difficult to keep buttons in place, but it's annoying nevertheless. [Just hit the "C" key to switch between "Cut through lines" and usual operation. It's fast and easy and documented in the help screen and doesn't clutter up the screen with floating toolbars.]- There's a question mark icon that you can click for a help screen. Maybe my work flow isn't what the designers envisioned, but almost nothing on the help screen was relevant to how I worked. I searched for and read help files as issues came up, but I didn't watch any of the videos.
- Line renumbering works! If a line gets skipped for some reason, it's not too hard to add it, enter the text manually, and have it renumber automatically. I'm not sure what would happen in a multi-column environment.
- The results of transcription after editing just 5 pages and retraining a model based on them are astounding. I can't emphasize enough how much easier this makes digitizing early modern printed texts and how radically this might change scholarship that draws on them. Things that once seemed impossible, or possible only for institutions with significant specialized personnel and IT resources, are now possible on my desktop in my spare time.
Anyway, thanks very much to all those who provided suggestions and corrections, and especially to the developers. eScriptorium is finally letting me do some things I've been hoping to do for almost 20 years.
