University Library of Mannheim

As part of the OCR-BW initiative in Baden-Württemberg, the University Library of Mannheim adopted eScriptorium as a free, open-source alternative to Transkribus for processing historical prints and manuscripts, including complex German Fraktur. Recognising that migration is rarely frictionless, the library published detailed guidance on exporting Transkribus ground truth and retraining models in eScriptorium. Mannheim developers went further, building a custom Tesseract extension so the platform could run Tesseract models alongside Kraken — a hybrid approach letting researchers benchmark and apply whichever open engine performed best on specific German administrative documents. A German university-library example notable for extending the software itself.