alt Hacker NewsMy dad died and had many many notebooks of his journals with very hard-to-read handwriting. Is it worth the effort to scan all of these so I can feed them in and go to work. Seems like so much minutia is out there, ready to be meta-understood.
My dad died and had many many notebooks of his journals with very hard-to-read handwriting. Is it worth the effort to scan all of these so I can feed them in and go to work. Seems like so much minutia is out there, ready to be meta-understood.
I set up an OCR flow using local models on all my many tens of journals stretching back the last 30 years.
I would say it's about 80% accurate, which means it's missing enough key words to make a lot of it uselessly unintelligible. I can easily compare the images against text I turn up in a grep which is nice if I'm looking for something.
Allegedly Claude set up a system for retraining for my handwriting, but it would require me to manually revise several hundred pages by hand so I don't think I'll ever do it.
https://github.com/508-dev/journal-ocr