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https://github.com/zellyn/transcriber

An app for crowdsourcing hand-transcriptions of (probably mostly Apple II) books
https://github.com/zellyn/transcriber

apple2 crowdsource transcription wip

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An app for crowdsourcing hand-transcriptions of (probably mostly Apple II) books

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README 

        
# transcriber



[![No Maintenance Intended](http://unmaintained.tech/badge.svg)](http://unmaintained.tech/)



Transcriber is a personal side-project of mine. The immediate goal is

to re-transcribe Jim Sather's _Understanding the Apple II_ and

_Understanding the Apple IIe_ books, which have been immeasurably

useful to me and other emulator writers. But of course I'd like to

build a generally useful tool in the process, so the big goal is to

create a useful platform for transcribing any old technical book.



## Vision



The eventual goal is to draw rectangles on the page to mark columns,

diagrams, images, etc., then do another round of rectangles to divide

each area up into individual paragraphs, and then let you transcribe

one paragraph at a time: all the sort of thing you can do fairly

mindlessly while watching TV.



## Status and intended architecture



It being a side project, I'm also doing a bit of experimenting with

technologies that I wouldn't sensibly use at work. The backend is

fairly boring, written in Go, with XML flat files as the data format,

because diffs between versions will be readable as text, and the

coordination method for contributing changes might just be git pull

requests. The backend exists, although the schema covers only basic

bibliographic data right now.



The protocol between backend and frontend is GraphQL, because I'd like

to get a bit of practical experience with it, rather than just hearing

hype or reading enough to get a basic philosophy. The backend uses the

fantastic [gqlgen](https://gqlgen.com/) library to generate Go code.



The frontend is likely to be written in [Elm](https://elm-lang.org/)

(remember, there's no innovation budget on side projects!), except for

the part where you drag rectangles around on images to select parts of

the page for transcription. Elm is bad at that kind of thing, so the

intention is to encapsulate that logic into a Web Component. That will

live (initially) at

[github.com/zellyn/rekt](https://github.com/zellyn/rekt), and is in

fact the part that I'm playing with now: learning how to resize and

rotate rectangles in SVG.



There is no timeline for any of this. I'm in a new role at work, and

our second kid is due towards the end of March 2019, so we'll see :-)