Long S support?

[edent]

Is it possible for your OCR software to recognise the archaic Long S - ſ

At the moment, it is being mistaken for the letter f

Paffed in the FIRST (and only) Seflion of the THIRD Parliament

Should be

Paſſed in the FIRST (and only) Seſlion of the THIRD Parliament

[Anterotesis]

I'm using Abbyy Finereader for OCR (sadly, no opensource equivalent is as good as Abbyy) and there does not seem any recognition for the long s.

Which is very annoying because it is such a common problem for pre 1800 texts.

Also, I have to admit to not sufficiently considering what the end result should be: texts with a standard orthography, or texts as they were printed? So corrections, whether on an ad hoc basis or through Ted Underwood's OCR Normalizer, have not preserved the long s but corrected it to our modern short s.

For the moment I am going to continue getting something useful - standardized, human- and machine- readable. But will do so in the knowledge I will have to revisit this issue.

(A related question is how accurate the statutes in the collections are when compared to the manuscript versions. But that's another can of worms.)

Thank you for the (first!) bug report!

[edent]

I've had success with https://github.com/tesseract-ocr - but not sure how it will cope with the long s.

One suggestion - could you link to the original scans? It might make it easier when correcting a transcription error.

[Anterotesis]

The Pickering vols I've used are listed here:
http://statutes.org.uk/site/collections/british-and-irish/pickering-statutes-at-large/
The Irish vols I OCR'd are the first set given here:
http://statutes.org.uk/site/collections/british-and-irish/ireland-to-1800/

I need to get on and list the other vols.