This book provides a comprehensive presentation of a recently introduced framework, named "probabilistic indexing" (PrIx), for searching text in large collections of document images and other related applications. It fosters the development of new search engines for effective information retrieval from manuscripts which, however, lack the electronic text (transcripts) that would typically be required for such search and retrieval tasks. 

The book is structured into 11 chapters and three appendices. The first two chapters briefly outline the necessary fundamentals and state of...