Comment by yannis

>Also modern transcription and historical document scanning have a similar shaped problem - dealing with misspelled words and trying to infer their corrections from context. Very true in my case on similar problems, my major issue was OCR relics. Reasonable mispelled words say by an uneducated person, are not that much of an issue. For the OP VOC work most letters were written by educated scribes and less of a problem. Anything before 1650 had very different calligraphy though.