transcriber

transcriber

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 library to generate Go code.

The frontend is likely to be written in Elm (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, 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 :-)