In the next few months you will likely be seeing a new version of eScriptorium come to your instance. If you’re using INRIA, you may have already seen the changes. This year has brought a new milestone with major additions and improvements to eScriptorium. These updates were so significant that we had even started naming this release ‘version 1.0’, (and they are even so significant that starting version 1.0, we’ll change our naming scheme, see below).
Alongside these updates to the software, we’re changing some of the ways in which we work to make updates more regular, stable and transparent. In this blog post we present something of a change-log (both to eScriptorium and the activities of the steering committee). We hope that these changes will help to improve your experience with eScriptorium and make the processes behind its development more transparent.
A New User Interface, Stability Improvements
The latest eScriptorium version brings a host of quality-of-life improvements over the last 0.13 version and a new, more user-friendly UI to the platform. If you are a long-term user, then these changes might come as a surprise and may take some time to adapt to. However, we feel that once you are familiar, you will find these features increase your productivity within the application. For those already familiar with eScriptorium, see this video guide to help you navigate the change.
New features
In 2022, the Mellon foundation funded the OpenITI Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project Phase II. For this second phase of the project, the OpenITI team identified a number of issues and difficulties with eScriptorium’s user interface that they felt constituted barriers to adoption of the software. Mellon generously agreed to fund (as a part of the grant) a redesign of eScriptorium to allow for an easier and more seamless experience. Users will encounter a new overall layout with sidebars, a dark mode, and improved navigation.
The new UI brings with it a series of small but useful features for improving document management. The update brings a new page: the document dashboard. On this dashboard you can quickly learn about your document, orient yourself within your workflow, and perform ‘quick actions’ on the whole document. Use this page to see what kinds of tasks were performed most recently on the document, browse metadata and read summary statistics on all types of document annotation.
Images within a document can now be viewed as a list or on a grid. You can search for individual images based on metadata, make a selection based on element number, and reorder selections of images. This should make it easier to perform specific tasks on a selection of images.
In the editing interface, you can now choose the location of the different editing panes and access the ontology as a pop up, rather than navigating to a different page. On the line reordering pane, lines of the transcription can be viewed nested under regions and entire regions can be reordered using click and drag.
General improvements
The new update comes with a large number of changes and improvements. For a full list, please see the change log. These improvements include significant backend changes which we hope will improve performance, tackling some important issues that our users have identified to us during the redevelopment process.
Feedback
As this update rolls out across eScriptorium instances we would welcome any feedback through the usual channels (Mailing list, Gitter). If you find that the new UI is preventing you from performing a task, then you can switch back to the old UI through the profile menu. If a change to the UI forces you to revert to the old UI, please report it so that we can address the issue for all users.
The eScriptorium Steering Committee and a New Phase of Development
If you have read the readMe for the eScriptorium codebase in the last year or so you might have seen mention of an ‘eScriptorium Steering Committee’. The assembly of this committee formalised the way in which major stakeholders had already been coordinating around the development of eScriptorium. The huge demands for developing and implementing the new UI and features further solidified this group and the manner in which we work together. Now that the new version has released, we’re ready to introduce a more formalised way of working that will bring fixed, stable releases and a more directed approach to bug squashing.
The Role of the Steering Committee
The Steering Committee is here to help make the project sustainable and coherent over time. Its role is to:
- Maintain oversight of what goes into each quarterly release.
- Validate community feature requests and merge requests and ensure they align with the project’s direction.
- Track funding needs and opportunities.
- Keep the overall roadmap on track.
We will be honest: we are still shaping the criteria for what the Steering Committee validates, and what a clear path toward the future of eScriptorium looks like in terms of features. We are also discussing how and when to open the Steering Committee to new members. For now, decisions are handled on a case-by-case basis, guided by two core principles:
- Keep the user interface as simple and approachable as possible.
- Keep the codebase as manageable as possible — eScriptorium is maintained by a small dedicated team, and sustainability matters.
How the Steering Committee works day to day. The Steering Committee meets every Monday (with some exceptions due to holidays for example) to review development progress, discuss upcoming features, handle incoming contacts, and make decisions on any matters that need attention. This regular cadence is what allows us to stay responsive and keep the quarterly schedule on track. It also means that if you reach out to us, you won’t be waiting long for things to move.
A Fixed Release Calendar
One of the most concrete changes is the introduction of a quarterly release cycle. Rather than shipping features and fixes on an unpredictable schedule, we are moving to a regular rhythm:
| Event | Dates |
|---|---|
| Beta release | April · July · October · January |
| Stable release | May · August · November · February |
Each quarter (Q1–4), a beta version will be made available at the start of the period, followed by a stable release one month later. We will do our best to stick to these dates — though we ask for a little grace around January 1st for obvious reasons!
This predictable schedule means you will always know roughly when the next version is coming, and you will be able to plan your work accordingly. If features that we planned for the releases are not ready, they will be pushed over the next quarter.
As a consequence of this schedule, and as with many other applications, we are moving to a new naming convention for eScriptorium: YEAR.MONTH, so that the next version after 1.0 will actually be… 26.04 for the beta, and 26.05 for the stable release.
What Makes the Cut for a Release
Every quarter, the same prioritization logic applies to what ends up in a release.
Bugs come first. Reproducible, tracked bugs are our top priority. If you are an advanced user and you encounter unexpected behavior, please report it as an issue. If you fit this profile of advanced users, we also kindly ask that you keep your browser’s developer tools open — even minimized — so that if something goes wrong, the information needed to diagnose it is readily available. If you are not an advanced user, do not worry about what you just read.
New features come second. Features are handled in two ways:
- Features developed by our lead developer and maintainer, Hassen Aguili, are budgeted into each quarter by the Steering Committee, carefully balanced against the time needed to handle bugs.
- Features contributed by the community through merge requests are also welcome, but they require review time from our maintainer, and any out-of-cycle merge request must first be validated by the Steering Committee before it can be considered.
To be clear, features contributed by the community are very welcome. Because we want to make sure every contribution lands well and has a future in the codebase, the best first step is to open an issue or contact the steering committee (see below) — whichever feels more natural to you. This lets the Steering Committee weigh in early and make sure the feature fits the project’s direction before significant development work is invested. While your team may have the capacity to build the feature, we also need to ensure that we can sustain it over the long term — maintaining, documenting, and supporting it as the project evolves.
Get in Touch: a Direct Line to the Steering Committee
We want to make it easy for the community to reach us — whether you have a feature idea, a question about contributing, or want to explore deeper involvement in the project.
We have opened a dedicated email address for exactly this: escriptorium-sc@groupes.renater.fr
This address reaches all members of the Steering Committee. Whether you want to:
- Suggest a new feature you would like to see in eScriptorium
- Contribute your time to the project, in whatever capacity
- Help with feature design or development
- Discuss financial contributions to support the project’s sustainability
…this is the right place to start. You should always receive a timely reply that at least acknowledges your mail, but a decision could take a little more time depending on the internal discussion.
Transparency: Open Milestones
To back all of this up with visible action, we are maintaining open milestones for each quarter (e.g. 2026 Q1). You can follow along, see what is planned, what is in progress, and what has been completed. This is our commitment to keeping the community informed — not just about what ships, but about how decisions are made along the way.
We know this kind of transparency takes effort to maintain, and we intend to keep it up.
Gratitude and Final Remarks
eScriptorium started life with PSL and we owe enormous thanks to these funders for getting the project off the ground (https://escriptorium.eu/funding/). The main changes that mark the latest release were made possible by a number of new funders, partners and team members. Our main funders were: the Mellon foundation, ATRIUM, Biblissima, the ERC, Inria and the EPHE. In the process of redesign we benefited from the participation of large numbers of eScriptorium users and stakeholders, without whom the redesign would not have been possible. Specific thanks goes to: the eScriptorium steering committee (who guided the whole process, not without significant debate!); Performant Software, particularly Chelsea Giordan (who drew up the new UI) and Ben Silverman (who implemented it); Robin Tissot (who directed the redevelopment and oversaw the integration of the new features); and Hassen Aguili (who pushed the new release over the line, developing a number of important new features along the way). We do not want to forget valuable community members such as Stefan Weil, who has always been quick to find issues and provide solutions for them.
I hope that this list illustrates the passion and expertise that has gone into reaching where we are today. We’re proud of where this small team of dedicated people has taken a piece of Open Source ATR software. We hope that with your support (and your feedback) we can continue to develop eScriptorium for the community. We hope that our new way of working will help to make it easier for you to be involved, ensure that eScriptorium is better for everyone and make our processes of development more open.
As part of being open we also hope to post updates more regularly too - so check back with this blog in a month or so to hear more about what we’re up to, specifically as version 26.05 will be out with new features!
Thank you to everyone who has joined us on this journey so far. We are very excited for the future of this platform which has been an absolute joy (if an occasional frustration) to develop.