The State of Syriac HTR on Transkribus: Benchmark Models and Workflows

Syriac — a Right-to-Left script used in some of the world's oldest Christian manuscripts — is now on Transkribus. This talk traces the full journey from fixing fundamental RTL directional logic in the platform to releasing two public models achieving a CER of 3.53%, along with Syriac HTR Guidelines that tackle the philological question of diacritic standardisation. A scalable roadmap for any researcher working with complex, low-resource RTL scripts.