I include for your delight and/or memory exhaustion (it's a big file) and/or patience exhaustion (it's very hard to read) a scanned page from Caroline Duncan's handwritten recipe book from the 1800s.

Your browser does not appear to support TIFF images, or just really hates very large ones

Your browser does not appear to support TIFF images, or just really hates very large ones

Your browser does not appear to support TIFF images, or just really hates very large ones

If the images above do no appear - and don't be shocked if it doesn't as a lot of browsers hate TIFF files, the links are:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49824751/Recipes-HiRes-Page01.tif

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49824751/Recipes-HiRes-Page02.tif

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49824751/Recipes-HiRes-Page03.tif

To me, this is cursive writing at its very best - full of expression, full of care, full of swirly bits. It's also why cursive has deteriorated over the decades, although the density of information is greater than with print and although it does develop fine motor skills that the majority of most modern adults simply don't have, it's a pain and three quarters to read. Indeed, that's kind-of the point. Cursive was for slower times, when care and attention mattered more than getting the gist of things.

The book is not horribly long, but I can't find anywhere online that is capable of storing images at a high enough resolution, and I can't find a decent program for converting bitmaps of this kind into programmatic descriptions.

Anyways, onto the challenge. Well, two challenges.

The Geek XYZZY-Prize shall be given to whoever can find a way to convert this kind of image into some useful representation, such as Metafont, Metaplot or Asymptote. Unless that can be done, I can't post the rest of the book.

The Recipe XANDBACON-Prize shall be given to whoever can actually read the book.

The prizes will probably be limited to something stupid, I don't have a whole lot and I'm not making a whole lot, so it'll be mostly for the glory and the pain unless there are intrigued whales. Sorry.

UPDATE: This post has added pages 2 and 3 of the book.