Note: We will treat single rectangular text blocks (Fig. 2) as given and proceed from here to present effective methods for generating a data set later used to train an OCR model. We show that pre-training on artificially created training data can significantly improve OCR accuracy. Due to the limited scope of the presented experiments, this approach is still limited in terms of retrieved glyph size, image quality and font style, hence the model is not necessarily directly applicable to other historical Chinese documents.