For more than a decade, Republican magazines and newspapers have been collected by institutes and projects now joined in the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS) at Heidelberg University. Our platform “Early Chinese Periodicals Online” (ECPO, https://uni-heidelberg.de/ecpo), provides open access to more than 300.000 digital images and their metadata, cf. Arnold and Hessel (2020) . Since the material consists mostly of image scans, the project ran a number of experiments to explore possible approaches towards full text generation (Arnold, 2021). For newspapers printed in Latin scripts much has changed since Rose Holley commented item “Use the ‘training’ facility (artificial intelligence) in the OCR software” with “Not viable for cost effective mass scale digitization” and noted “Do not pursue” in her list of “Potential methods of improving OCR accuracy suggested by ANDP team” (Holley, 2009, table 2, item 9). Today, when researchers write that “transforming [historical newspapers] into machine-readable data by means of OCR poses some major challenges” they do that while they introduce their own OCR pipeline (Holley, 2009).