On Friday 15th of February 2013, we have released a number of new functions and improvements in the Virtual Transcription Laboratory (http://wlt.synat.pcss.pl) portal.

These are the most prominent ones:

• noticeable improvement of capability and stability of whole portal activities,
• change in the way of transcription edition history is stored,
• import of existing DjVu publication on the basis of the OAI identifier (this feature is described in an end-user documentation),
• batch OCR for all files in the project,
• notifications showing whether changed performed in transcription editor were saved,
• many minor improvements and bug fixes reported by users,
• the first version of documentation for users has been published (http://confluence.man.poznan.pl/community/display/WLT).

A few months passed since the BETA release of VTL. We would like to thank everyone for their feedback ;-). After the initial release it became clear that serious changes must be done in the portal engine. The most important was the change in the way transcription is represented and stored in database. This was a very significant thing but it resulted in a significant performance and stability improvement.

In the near future two new functions will be added:

• export of project results in EPUB format,
• the possibility to upload TIFF files into the project (they will be automatically converted to  PNG file in 300 DPI).

Authors of the post: Bogna Wróż, Adam Dudczak