Transcribe a historical letter without modernising the hand

The failure mode with historical material is not a bad restoration - it is a beautiful one that has quietly rewritten a seventeenth-century hand into something a modern eye finds easier. Once that has happened, the palaeographic evidence is gone and no one can tell.

Capture

1. 1Even, diffuse light. Raking light exaggerates cockling on brittle paper and produces shadows that read as ink.
2. 2Include a scale bar or ruler in the frame if you have one - it makes the capture citable.
3. 3Never flatten brittle originals. Photograph them as they lie; curvature is corrected afterwards.
4. 4Capture the reverse too if there is anything on it, including offsetting and iron gall burn-through.

Restore the surface, not the writing

Use archival revival rather than full restoration. It handles cracks, foxing and surface degradation on aged paper without redrawing lettering. Stroke density is recovered at the pen's own weight, using the writer's other letters on the page as the reference - which is why the hand stays the hand.

Transcribe as separate text

The palaeography pass reads secretary hand, early modern scripts and Latin abbreviation, and delivers the reading as text beside the image rather than over it. The image is never annotated with a modern rendering, which keeps the artefact and the reading as two separate things - which is what a citation needs.

Check the expansions

Abbreviation expansions are marked, so an editor can see where the pass made a judgement rather than read a word. Uncertain words are listed with the original crop beside them. Work through that list before publishing the transcription - it is short, and it is where the errors are.