I can't believe that I haven' t written about Transcript before. Transcript is a freeware program from Jacob Boerema. It is a practically perfect small program for transcribing from images. For example, if you download an image of census record, Transcript will allow you to open the image in the top half of your screen and then use the lower half of the screen to transcribe whatever you see. The program has built in formatting features for the text and will save or export the text to almost any word processor. The program also recognizes a variety of image formats and has a zoom feature so you can zoom in on a portion of the image you are trying to read. There are also a variety of image tools allowing you to rotate the image.
I often take digital pictures of book pages from reference materials and use this program to transcribe the text. It is so much better than opening two windows and trying to keep them aligned. Oh, did I mention the brightness tool that allows you to adjust the brightness of the image. All of this in a freeware program. It is hard to beat that.
This is a great tip - I always hated trying to keep the screens aligned and decided it was better to transcribe by writing first from a hard copy then re-typing. Thanks for the time saver!
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this. I downloaded and installed Transcript on my desktop machine. I'm interested in Spanish Colonial Florida, and am therefore majoring in Spanish and History at the University of North Florida. Not only is Transcript handy for family documents, but also for helping me keep my Spanish Paleography skills sharp by providing a great platform for transcribing documents.
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