What is cursive?
Millions of documents written in cursive — most still unread
Cursive was the dominant handwriting style across Europe and the Americas from the 17th century well into the 20th. Letters, diaries, court records, church books, and administrative documents were all written in flowing, connected scripts. Today, millions of these documents sit in archives and family collections — legible to fewer and fewer people. Transkribus makes them readable again.
English cursive, copperplate, and running hand
German Kurrent and Sütterlin (1500s–1940s)
French, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch cursive styles
Administrative and legal hands from any century
Personal letters, diaries, and family documents
How it works
AI reads cursive — not by matching letters, but by learning handwriting
Standard OCR fails on cursive because it tries to match individual characters against fixed templates. Cursive letters connect, overlap, and vary from writer to writer — there are no fixed templates. Transkribus uses a different approach: neural networks trained on millions of handwritten words that learn to read cursive the way a human does — by recognizing patterns across entire lines.
Neural networks trained on 30+ million handwritten words
Reads connected, overlapping, and irregular letter forms
Layout analysis detects lines, columns, and marginalia automatically
Works on faded ink, damaged paper, and low-contrast scans
Confidence scores let you assess accuracy for every line
Addres to dear Isabella on the Authors
recovery
O Isa pain did visit me
I was at the last extremity
How often did I think of you
I wished your graceful form to view
To clasp you in my weak embrace
Indeed I thought Id run my race
Good Care Im sure was of me taken
But indeed I was much shaken
At last I daily strength did gain
Comparison
Cursive converter: Transkribus vs. standard OCR
Standard OCR is built for printed text. Transkribus is built for handwriting.
| Feature | Transkribus | Standard OCR |
|---|---|---|
| Cursive handwriting | Yes | No |
| Connected letter forms | Yes | No |
| Historical scripts (Kurrent, Sütterlin) | Yes | No |
| Printed text | Yes | Yes |
| Custom model training | Yes | No |
| Layout analysis | Yes | Limited |
| 100+ languages | Yes | Limited |
| European hosting (GDPR) | Yes | Limited |
Comparison based on general-purpose OCR services. Capabilities may vary by provider.
AI models
300+ public models for different cursive styles
Every writer's cursive is different — and so are our AI models. The Transkribus community has trained over 300 public models for specific scripts, languages, and document types. Find one that matches your documents, or use Text Titan I, our flagship model that handles most cursive styles out of the box.
Text Titan I: general-purpose model for cursive and print
Specialized models for Kurrent, Sütterlin, copperplate, and more
Community-trained models shared freely across the platform
Filter by language, century, and script type
Models improve continuously as more training data is added
Custom training
Train the AI on your specific cursive handwriting
Public models deliver strong results out of the box. But if you need even higher accuracy for a specific writer, script, or document collection, you can train a custom AI model on your own data. Transkribus handles the training infrastructure — you just provide the transcribed pages.
Train with as few as 50 transcribed pages
Fine-tune on your specific writer or cursive style
Models improve as you add more training data
Share models with your team or the community
Ready to convert your cursive documents?
Create a free account to convert cursive to text, train custom models, and unlock the full platform.
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200M+Pages processed
500K+Users worldwide
300+Public AI models