Incunabula

Incunabula (singular: incunabulum) are the earliest printed books in Europe. The incunabula project eases transcribing them for Wikisource.

When transcribing a document, you need to be able to check for OCR errors. This is difficult with incunabula, because they make extensive use of sigla (scribal abbreviations). For example, here's a line from the Cologne edition of De proprietatibus rerum:

vnde non eſt maior in tribus ꝙͣ in vna nec minor in vna dicitur ꝙͣ in tribus. patet itaqꝫ multipliciter anime ꝓprietas ſecundum rem et diffinitionem.

which is to say

unde non est maior in tribus quam in una, nec minor in una dicitur quam in tribus. patet itaque multiplex anime proprietas secundum rem et diffinitionem.

The incunabula tool automatically expands scribal abbreviations, then checks them against Wiktionary to highlight any possible errors. The current page image shows up in a panel so that you can compare the text with it. The tool also allows you to compare the text against a known good version at the same time.