Historical handwriting recognition (HTR) & multilingual document AI. Building specialist recognisers that stay faithful to the page where general VLMs hallucinate; cross-lingual transfer for low-resource scripts.
Reading order: the quiet problem after you've found the lines 📜
On a historical page with more than one column, finding the text lines is largely solved. Deciding the order to read them in is not, and that order is what a recogniser is ultimately given. On multi-column pages a perfectly recognised page can still come out in the wrong order.
I built a small, learning-free step that recovers the order, and benchmarked it against htrflow, Microsoft's Table Transformer and PaddleOCR on 198 real handwritten tables (the USS Jeannette Arctic logbook).
A few honest findings: - On dense handwritten tables, most detectors barely find the lines at all, so detection, not ordering, is the harder part there. - Given the lines, the simple step is level with much heavier table models, and they all reach the same ceiling. A shared open problem, not solved by any one of them.