I used Leo to transcribe 18th and 19th century American letters written in cursive. Some of the letters have cross-writing. To save paper, people would use a technique called cross-writing or cross-hatching, where they would fill a page with text and then turn the paper 90 degrees to write more lines perpendicularly over the first.
The largest numbers of errors in the transcription were found in the cross-writing (vertical and top-most text). I don’t know why this would be the case. I think Leo makes a lot of educated guesses about what the text ‘should be’ which turn out to be pretty accurate. Errors results from Leo not being able to assess things like gender, gender roles, and customs common for a time period. Leo was able to identify new sentences even though the author failed to use any punctuation marks.
