Cousin Gert found a “treasure” in the Jerichower family archive!
When a pensioner sets his mind to something 😉
Since the book was printed in the typeface commonly used at the time – Fraktur – it
(when converted to PDF) unfortunately cannot be searched electronically!
As a result, only conversion to the typeface commonly used today can produce searchable files. These are also more effective for research purposes.
So step 1 followed – placing all the pages of the book individually on the scanner and digitising them.
In the second step, I looked for a way to convert this blackletter font into our “modern” font, preferably automatically.
I succeeded in doing this with the possibilities offered by the Transkribus project. In this project, members trained an AI (a model) for German Fraktur.
The transfer should be free of charge if possible. However, this took some time, as only a limited number of transfers are possible per month.
As with scanning, the transfer can only be done page by page.
I copied the text from this “translation” into a word processor (Word).
Now I could create a searchable PDF!
BUT, I wanted more – a printed copy.
So, step 3
Once the text had been transferred, corrected and formatted to a reasonable standard, I was able to start printing. To keep the pages together afterwards, I wanted to bind them, and to prevent the packs from becoming too thick, I had to print several smaller brochures (which also had to fit together).
Step 4 on the way to creating your book – fold all pages neatly.
In step 5, all pages are bound together.
Let’s see how it goes.
To be continued!