I've just made available a couple of small developments which we're  
working on to help us work with the ALTO format. These are just  
initial releases to the community and are heavily focused on our own  
needs here but they may well prove useful to somebody else, and I  
actively encourage community development to improve them. I will  
certainly be looking to add value to the codebase as time progresses.

In the meantime, let me introduce

AbbyyToAlto - a converter from the Abbyy FineReader XML document  
format to ALTO

Blog update: http://blog.nuclear-dawn.com/2010/09/abbyy-to-alto-converter/

Code on Github: http://github.com/Surfrdan/AbbyyToAlto


and

ALTO Viewer - a basic viewer for overlaying highighted transparent  
layers representing TextBlocks, TextLines, Strings etc from the ALTO  
document, over the image they represent. This was born out of a need  
to debug my AbbyyToAlto converter but has grown into a useful little  
tool for us to use in testing/QA.


Blog update: http://blog.nuclear-dawn.com/2010/05/alto-viewer/

Code on Github: http://github.com/Surfrdan/altoviewer

I hope somebody else finds them of use.

-- 
Dan Field <[log in to unmask]>                   Ffôn/Tel. +44 1970 632 582
Peiriannydd Meddalwedd                          Senior Software Engineer
Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru                   National Library of Wales