Paleography experts spend many hours transcribing ancient documents and state-of-the-art handwritten text recognition systems are not suitable for performing this task automatically. We propose here a new interactive, on-line framework which, rather than full automation, aims at assisting the experts in the proper recognition-transcription process; that is, facilitate and speed up the transcription of old documents. This framework combines the efficiency of automatic handwriting recognition systems with the accuracy of the experts, leading to a cost-effective perfect transcription of ancient manuscripts.