I've been hard at work trying to get the text of forty of my father's articles on Gothic architecture digitized and typeset before the first day of classes in another 16 days. Much of the main text of each article is in 12-point English text and can be subjected to optical character recognition (OCR), which saves me having to type it. But the footnotes are something else, and there are scads of them. They are filled with book titles in italics, and in a variety of languages. The originals are poorly reproduced and covered with pen-marks. So what I have to work with is a mess. OCR-ing is still somewhat faster and less exhausting than typing by hand, but maybe not by much.
Below are some examples from a recent encounter:
OCRed as
Nisdeniieitiidenod Nonuhmirtbe Archikkhir in Utaher der Frubfwiik
and retyped as
Niederrheinsiche und Norm\"anische Architektur in Zeitalter der Fr\"uhgotik
OCRed as
I\~mbardArrbittdw
and retyped as
Lombard Architecture
OCRed as
WtenerJabrbucbftrKua.r&tschich/e
and retyped as
Wiener Jahrbuch f\"ur Kunstgeschichte