Software for transcrbing and displaying old handwritten documents

[rowan.bradley]

I have a lot of old handwritten documents relating to my ancestors. I am looking for the best way of transcribing these. Ideally I would like to add to a scan of the document, searchable and copyable text, with each word correctly located on top of the handwritten word in the scan (a bit like Google Books does it). Is there software that will create such documents for me? I believe that PDF files can contain multiple layers, so it should in theory be possible to add a text layer to the scan. But whether it is easily possible to position the typed word over the hand written word, I doubt. For clarify, I am not looking for OCR, which will not be possible with these old letters. I will manually transcribe the documents. But I am looking for a productive way of doing this, and of displaying the results.

Thanks - Rowan

[Guy]

Yes that is very easy to do.
See http://anguline.co.uk/test.pdf

I have typed the words JOHN SON OF JOSEPH on a layer in Adobe Photoshop and saved the image on a layer above the layer holding the text.
I then saved the resulting image as a pdf file.

If you open in a PDF reader you can search for any of the words a group of the words or the complete phrase.

Cheers
Guy

PS the file may download to your computer rather than display

[Anne in Carlisle]

Can't see the typing Guy. I'd be interested to see what it looks like because I was thinking along the same lines myself but haven't attempted it yet.
Anne

[Guy]

No you don't see the typing the typing is hidden under the original image but if you open the file in a pdf reader such as Acrobat reader and use search or find to locate any of the words John son of Joseph the word searched for will be highlighted on the image.
In other words I have manually OCRed those four words.

I thought that was what was required.
If you want to see the typing open the pdf file test.pdf in a program such as Adobe Photoshop and bring the the base layer to the top.
Even then you may have trouble as I did not change the text colour from the white foreground colour I had previously been using. If you want the text to be black simply choose black as the forground colour, select the text icon and draw the cursor over the words John the son of Joseph and the words will appear in black.

Cheers
Guy

[Guy]

I have added more text to the image.
You can now search for any word between These and 1818

Cheers
Guy

I have not bothered with aligngment which can be seen if you look for July