Louis is the "same name" as Clovis. I mean by that it is how the name evolved as the dynasties changed their language from Frankish to Latin to then French.
Clovis was the first king unifying all Franks, so many Frank kings are named Clovis ... and later ones are named Louis.
Clovis is also the modern French rendition of that name. In Old Frankish it was something like Chlodowig. Hence why king Louis is called Lodewijk in Dutch and Ludwig in German.
Not sure; I’ve wondered that before too. If I had to guess I’d say people just keep naming future kings after previously liked kings - the first few king Louis weren’t all that popular, but later on there were some popular ones (Louis IX was named a saint, for instance, which may have boosted it).
16 is certainly a lot of kings to have the same name. I believe there’s 20-something Pope Johns, if I recall correctly
Some people rely on ‘screen readers’ (software that reads text on the screen out loud when you move your finger over it) to browse content on Lemmy. Some screen readers can read text on images (I know Apple’s does, not sure about Android), but obviously it can make mistakes and there’s missing context a lot of the time. Hence the transcriptions.
There are also a couple of other benefits. The post is more likely to appear in search results if someone searches for text included in the transcription. And if the image fails to load for whatever reason, or the image host deletes it, you can get the gist from the transcription.