How it works
AI trained on centuries of Latin manuscripts
Transkribus uses deep learning trained on millions of manuscript pages from the early Middle Ages to the 19th century. The AI recognises the distinctive letter forms of historical Latin scripts — from the rounded strokes of Caroline minuscule to the dense verticals of Gothic textura — and converts them into modern, searchable text.
Reads Caroline minuscule, Gothic textura, humanist script, and more
300+ public models for different handwriting styles and time periods
Works with phone photos or high-resolution scans
Genealogy & research
Unlock the Latin records behind every European family tree
Latin was the language of the Church, the law, and the university for over a thousand years. Across all of Catholic Europe — from Ireland to Poland, from Scandinavia to Sicily — parish registers, wills, and charters were written in Latin. If you are tracing ancestors before the 18th or 19th century, you will almost certainly encounter Latin documents.
Catholic parish registers (baptisms, marriages, burials) — the most common Latin genealogy source
Wills, testaments, and probate inventories
Medieval and early modern charters and land grants
Papal documents, bishop's visitation records, and church court proceedings
University matriculation records and academic theses
Monastic chronicles, cartularies, and account books
Beyond the demo
The full platform for historical documents
The demo above gives you a taste. The full Transkribus platform lets you process thousands of pages, train custom AI models on your specific handwriting, search across all your documents, and export in any format you need.
Train custom models on your specific manuscript style
Full-text search across all your transcribed documents
Export as TXT, DOCX, PDF, TEI-XML, or PAGE XML
Collaborate with research teams and share collections
What you can transcribe
Common documents in Latin script
Latin was the written lingua franca of Western civilisation for over a millennium. The range of surviving documents is vast — from parchment charters sealed with wax to neatly penned parish register entries. Transkribus handles them all.
Parish registers across Catholic Europe — from the Council of Trent (1563) onward
Medieval charters, deeds, and legal instruments
Monastic records, cartularies, and account rolls
Papal bulls, episcopal letters, and Inquisition records
University records, dissertations, and lecture notes
Printed Latin texts in blackletter and antiqua typefaces
Background
What are the main Latin script types?
Latin was written in many different scripts over the centuries, each with its own distinctive letter forms. Understanding which script you are looking at helps you place a document in time and context. Here are the main types you will encounter:
Caroline minuscule – the clear, rounded hand standardised under Charlemagne (9th century), the ancestor of modern lowercase letters
Gothic textura (textualis) – the dense, angular script dominant from the 12th to the 15th century in northern Europe
Humanist minuscule – revived by Italian Renaissance scholars in the 1400s, modelled on Caroline originals; the basis of Roman typefaces
Beneventan script – a distinctive south Italian hand used from the 8th to the 13th century
Cursive documentary hands – the rapid, often heavily abbreviated scripts used for charters, court records, and administrative documents
The technology
How does Latin manuscript recognition work?
Handwriting recognition (HTR – Handwritten Text Recognition) uses deep learning neural networks to convert images of handwritten text into machine-readable characters. Unlike OCR for printed text, HTR must handle the infinite variation in human handwriting — different letter shapes, connected strokes, and abbreviation systems that change across centuries and regions.
Neural networks trained on millions of handwritten samples
Layout analysis detects lines and text regions automatically
Character-level recognition handles connected and cursive writing
Language models improve accuracy by understanding word context and Latin abbreviations
AI Models for Latin Manuscripts
Browse public models trained on Latin manuscripts — Caroline minuscule, Gothic textura, humanist script, and more.
Ready to read Latin manuscripts?
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200M+Pages processed
500K+Users worldwide
300+Public AI models