Transcription use case: displaying positional information

[tristanr-cogapp]

In many cases for typewritten documents, transcriptions are obtained via OCR and are available in a format that contains positional information along with the extracted text (the format I am most familiar with for this is ALTO).

It would be good to be able to support this or similar formats in order to show transcriptions laid out in a similar manner to the source document (e.g. these screenshots from an item from the Qatar Digital Library at http://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100023722174.0x00000b#transcription after clicking the 'Apply Page Layout' button in the Transcription section, compared to the original image):

The other way in which this positional information could be applied would be to provide the transcription as an overlay, or for search term highlighting. E.g. in this screenshot from the Wellcome Player for http://wellcomelibrary.org/player/b18024130#?asi=0&ai=1&z=0.0588%2C0.5962%2C0.944%2C0.5102 where I have searched for the word "Pacific":

[edsu]

Perhaps this should be a separate requirement, but it would be super nice if there was an option and ability to make sure the text of the transcription is made available somehow to search engine bots that execute JavaScript.