800 Years of English Handwriting
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800 Years of English Handwriting
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: 800 Years of English Handwriting
#2Slightly off-topic:
1. When I loaded the page, it bombarded me with a banner asking me, "Interested in sports?" (Yes, I am, but I came here to read about English handwriting. Go away.)
2. At the end, it presented me with a "badge" for finishing a whole "book"! Yeah, maybe people's attention spans would be better if they weren't bombarded with little banners at the beginning.
Re: 800 Years of English Handwriting
#3Slightly off-topic: 1. When I loaded the page, it bombarded me with a banner asking me, "Interested in sports?" (Yes, I am, but I came here to read about English handwriting. Go away.) 2. At the end, it presented me with a "badge" for finishing a whole "book"! Yeah, maybe people's attention spans would be better if they weren't bombarded with little banners at the beginning.
And when I visited the page with JavaScript disabled, it displayed all the text but no images.
HTML has the img tag. There’s no need for JavaScript to add images to the DOM!
Re: 800 Years of English Handwriting
#4Slightly off-topic: 1. When I loaded the page, it bombarded me with a banner asking me, "Interested in sports?" (Yes, I am, but I came here to read about English handwriting. Go away.) 2. At the end, it presented me with a "badge" for finishing a whole "book"! Yeah, maybe people's attention spans would be better if they weren't bombarded with little banners at the beginning.
And when I visited the page with JavaScript disabled, it displayed all the text but no images. HTML has the img tag. There’s no need for JavaScript to add images to the DOM!
Sorry. That was an oversight. Now the text is also generated by JavaScript manipulating the DOM tree.
/S
Re: 800 Years of English Handwriting
#5For me it's in Dutch, it must detect my language and adapt (since HN block non-English content)?
Re: 800 Years of English Handwriting
#6I always like throwing these old handwritten documents into LLMs to see how well they do. GPT5 did nicely on the quitclaim deed in Anglicana, which is very hard to read.
Re: 800 Years of English Handwriting
#7Browsing this led me to wonder if there is a font available for the Carolingian Minuscule style. Found "Dr. Pfeffer's Fonts", apparently free to download. Wasn't disappointed. I might try using one as a coding font for that real meditative "monastic scribe" kind of vibe...
https://robert-pfeffer.net/schriftarten/englisch/index.html?...
Re: 800 Years of English Handwriting
#8This is really beautiful content. I’m assuming it comes from the fact that there are Google teams tasked with digitizing old manuscripts?
I work with a library (Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica) in Amsterdam that has thousands of manuscripts from the renaissance to the early modern period… all very esoteric. We really want to get the renaissance into model training! Over 75% of books (1450-1700) are unscanned — and the manuscripts are in even worse shape.
Curious if anyone knows if there any new handwriting recognition benchmarks? I’ve noticed the main model providers have plateaued in the past year on their ability to read manuscripts / modern handwriting… I think the lack of well-designed competitive benchmarks is the issue…
I love positive examples of the intersection of AI and the humanities.
Re: 800 Years of English Handwriting
#9For me it's in Dutch, it must detect my language and adapt (since HN block non-English content)?
Presumably they are doing that based on browser or OS language settings rather than IP-based location? As an English-speaker living in a German-speaking land nothing infuriates me more than websites that assume I would rather have German language content simply based on my IP address rather than checking my system language.
But yes, to confirm your assumption - I followed the link above and got the English version.
Re: 800 Years of English Handwriting
#10It should've included another 100 years to catalogue and showcase the devolvement towards kindergarten handwriting.