Theoriginalmotivationsfordevelopingopticalcharacterrecognitiontechnologies weremodesttoconvertprintedtexton?atphysicalmediatodigitalform, prod- ingmachine-readabledigitalcontent. Bydoingthis, wordsthathadbeeninertand bound to physical material would be brought into the digital realm and thus gain newandpowerfulfunctionalitiesandanalyticalpossibilities. First-generation digital OCR researchers in the 1970s quickly realized that by limiting their ambitions primarily to contemporary documents printed in st- dard font type from the modern Roman alphabet (and of these, mostly English language...