I. Introduction
Nowadays, a large number of historical documents have been digitized and made available to the public. With the increasing availability of computers and text-based software, the analysis of such documents is leveraged to higher dimensions leading to novel interests in digital humanities research. Historical Document Image Analysis and Recognition (HDIAR) methodologies are now widely used to enable computers to recognize the text content of documents. The vision of HDIAR is the automatic extraction of the information contained in a document; this includes the actual textual (and pictorial) information as well as writer identification, word spotting, or meta data.