Tierline Lens / Help & support
Getting help with Tierline Lens
Contact: tierline.archives@gmail.com
When you write, please say which version you have (Workbench → Privacy and settings shows it), your Chrome version (chrome://version), and what you did, what you expected and what happened. Please do not send your documents, scans, transcriptions or library: describe the problem instead. If a particular file fails to import, say what kind of file it is, how large it is and how many pages it has, and what Lens said.
Getting started
- Select a passage on a web page and press Alt+Shift+K, or right-click it and choose *Find connections with
Tierline*. Quick Lens opens in the side panel.
- Press Alt+Shift+W (or *Open the Workbench* at the foot of Quick Lens) for the full Workbench.
- To transcribe a scan: Workbench → Page Studio → *Choose a file…* (or drop the file there). Open a page and
press Read this page. Click a word on the page or in the text to select it, and press Enter to correct it.
Common questions
Does Lens upload my documents or scans? No. Page Studio reads pages on your computer. Nothing you import, read or correct is sent anywhere. The only things Lens ever sends are online-archive searches you make (off until you turn them on) and image requests you ask for. Privacy and settings lists every request sent this session.
Which languages and scripts can Page Studio read? Printed English in the Latin alphabet. It does not read handwriting, and it is not trained on Cherokee or any other Indigenous language. You can still keep such pages in Page Studio and transcribe them by hand, with the same history, review and citation as a machine reading.
Why did Page Studio change a name or spelling? It should not, and it never does so on purpose: no spelling is modernised and no name is normalised. If the reader misread a word, the original reading is kept and your correction is recorded beside it. Pages read before 0.5.0's defaults may have used English word lists, which the reading's details (*This page*, in the context panel) record.
A page reads in the wrong order, or misses a column. Dense two-column pages and margin notes are the hardest case. In the context panel, under *This page*, open *Read this page again* and choose *One column of text* (or the other way round), or select the words and correct them. Every reading is kept: your corrections stay with the reading they were made to, and you choose which reading the transcription starts from.
The page was scanned sideways or upside down. Turn it the right way up in the viewer (R, or the *Turn right* and *Turn left* buttons) before pressing *Read this page*, or before *Read this page again*: Page Studio reads it the way you have turned it, and the words stay on the page as it was scanned.
A file is refused. Lens reads a file's kind from its contents, not its name. It accepts PNG, JPEG and WebP images up to 16,384 pixels a side and 50 megapixels, and PDFs up to 60 MB (of a PDF with more than 2,000 pages, the first 2,000 are listed, and Lens says so). Encrypted PDFs, TIFF, HEIC and handwriting-only formats are not supported; the message says which limit applied.
The reader stopped, or says it ran out of memory. It restarts by itself; read the page again. Very large pages are scaled to 24 megapixels before reading, and small images are enlarged up to twice. Closing other heavy tabs helps on computers with little memory.
The words come out badly on a small or blurry image. Page Studio reads best from scans of about 300 dots per inch. A page image under about 1,000 pixels tall loses many words even after enlarging; use a larger scan if one exists.
Where is my data, and how do I back it up? In this browser profile only. Workbench → Privacy and settings → *Back up everything* saves a file you keep; *Restore a backup…* reads one back. Removing the extension or clearing site data deletes the library, so keep a backup.
"Show on page" asks for permission. Lens can read a page only when you invoke it there. To find a saved passage again on a page you reloaded, Chrome asks whether Lens may read that one site.
Troubleshooting
A fuller guide is in the beta kit: docs/lens-next/beta/TROUBLESHOOTING.md.
Privacy
See the privacy policy: Tierline Lens privacy policy.