ub-mannheim / reichsanzeiger-gt

Ground truth for German newspaper "Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Preußischer Staatsanzeiger" (1819–1945)

reichsanzeiger-gt

Ground truth for German newspaper "Deutscher Reichsanzeiger und Preußischer Staatsanzeiger" (German Imperial Gazette and Prussian Official Gazette), which was published under changing names from 1819 to 1945 (https://digi.bib.uni-mannheim.de/periodika/reichsanzeiger/ausgaben).

The ground truth is provided as PAGE-XML and URLs for the corresponding newspaper scans/images. Use the provided bash-script to download the images.

Images:

Images can be downloaded via script

./download_images.sh

Quantity:

• 197 single newspaper pages
• 119 429 ground truth lines

Period:

1820–1939

Font / Writing class:

Fraktur, Latin

Languages:

German, English, French, Portuguese, Italian, Latin

Transcription guidelines:

All transcriptions were created using Transkribus. The transcription rules are based on the OCR-D transcription guidelines Level 2 with some exceptions (see below):

Special characters:

• Long s (ſ)
• Currency symbols: German Mark (ℳ) and Pfennig (₰), $, £
• Fractions (¼ ½ ¾ ⅐ ⅑ ⅒ ⅓ ⅔ ⅕ ⅖ ⅗ ⅘ ⅙ ⅚ ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞)
• Fraction slash (⁄) (U+2044), if
  • can't be transcribed by a unicode fraction representation
  • numerator and denominator are not on the same baseline height
• R rotunda (ꝛ)
• Combining Latin Small Letter E for old German Umlaut ( ͤ )
• Dagger (†)
• Black Right Pointing Index (☛)
• Black Left Pointing Index (☚)
• White square (□)
• Superscript Numbers 0-9 (⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹)

Normalizations:

• Roman numerals ⅠⅤ Ⅹ Ⅼ Ⅽ Ⅾ Ⅿ --> I V X L C D M
• Em dash (—) instead of En dash (–)
• Asterisk (*) used for both standard asterisk (*) and tear-drop asterisk (✽)

Additional characters transcribed true to original (contrary to OCR-D Level 2):

• Double oblique hyphen (⸗)

Funding

This revision is predominantly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Links

• A digital edition of the Reichsanzeiger is provided by Mannheim University Library.
• See the Reichsanzeiger wiki for more information.

reichsanzeiger-gt's Issues

PAGE XML contains `TextEquiv` with empty `Unicode`

The PAGE XML files contain lots of text regions without text in their TextEquiv and a few text files without text in their TextEquiv:

# Text regions without text.
% git grep "^                <Unicode></Unicode>" | wc -l
   17097
# Text lines without text:
% git grep "^                    <Unicode></Unicode>" | wc -l  
       6

Text from regions with text in lines but without text in the region gets lost when the PAGE XML file is converted to pure text using ocr-transform.