I helped "writing" a cookbook from my grandmother's recipes. For her 100th birthday, my dad rescued more than 250+ pages of recipes that my Grandma had collected over the years. Some were written in typing machine, others written by hand by her. So, my dad scanned (pictured) all the typed recipes, and "dictated" all the handwritten.
For the dictated recipes, I told him to dictate just "flat" the words and numbers. So that I had paragraphs of recipes.
For the scanned recipes, I used Google OCR (I found out it was the best one quality wise).
For both sets of recipes, I then used GPT4 to "format" the unformatted recipes into well formatted Markdown. It successfully fixed typos and bad OCR from Google.
We then pasted all that well formatted text into a big Google Docs, and added images. Using OpenAI image generation I generated images for each of the 250+ recipes. For some of them I had to manually curate it, given that some of the recipes are for typical Mexican food: For example there's a (delicious) recipe called "PibiPollo" that for the unitiated it may look like a stew, so I had to tell something like "large corn tamale with thick hard crust".
In the end, the book was pretty nice! We distributed digital copies within the family and everybody was amazed :) . I loved spending time doing that.
This is absolutely awesome. I really want to do the same for my mom’s recipe before it’s too late. Though I wonder what would have happened if you went for GPT-V or LLaVa and the like. I have a hunch you might have been able to skip over the OCR part and straight from picture to markdown? Would be awesome if you can try and compare!
I cannot share the full book because a) I don't own the copyright and b) My dad (who ultimately owns it) still has plans to put sell it. And I feel it still requires some editing. But I can share a couple of sample pages:
For the dictated recipes, I told him to dictate just "flat" the words and numbers. So that I had paragraphs of recipes.
For the scanned recipes, I used Google OCR (I found out it was the best one quality wise).
For both sets of recipes, I then used GPT4 to "format" the unformatted recipes into well formatted Markdown. It successfully fixed typos and bad OCR from Google.
We then pasted all that well formatted text into a big Google Docs, and added images. Using OpenAI image generation I generated images for each of the 250+ recipes. For some of them I had to manually curate it, given that some of the recipes are for typical Mexican food: For example there's a (delicious) recipe called "PibiPollo" that for the unitiated it may look like a stew, so I had to tell something like "large corn tamale with thick hard crust".
In the end, the book was pretty nice! We distributed digital copies within the family and everybody was amazed :) . I loved spending time doing that.