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• Presents the process to create a new database of historical tabular manuscripts. • The created database is called HisClima and is freely accessible. • Interactive DLA was used to ease text line detection and table structure creation. • Computer assisted transcription was used to ease the text information acquisition. • Baseline results for DLA, Text Recognition and Probabilistic Indexing are provided. Processing automatically historical document images to allow the search of textual information requires the preparation of ground-truth data for training and evaluation. This process is an expensive and arduous task, especially when the historical document images contain specialized vocabulary and/or tabular information. In the latter case, relevant decisions have to be taken to annotate the tabular parts. This paper presents a complex collection of historical document images and the resulting database, which is called HisClima. In this database, half of the images are in tabular format and half as running text. Both types of images contain pre-printed and handwritten text. The textual information is plenty of abbreviations and specific vocabulary related to weather conditions and old ships. This database can be used to research technologies related to historical document image processing and analysis, both for tabular and running text recognition. Baseline results are presented for Document Layout Analysis, Text Recognition, and Probabilistic Indexing. Although these results are good, there is still room for improvement and some indications are provided in this direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus departed from the port of Palos de la Frontera, located in a small cove in southwestern Spain, and returned to this same port on March 15, 1493. On the basis of sedimentology, geochemistry, paleontology and dating of a long core (18 m) collected in this cove, thirteen facies are distinguished in the Neogene-Holocene evolution of its sedimentary infilling, with a transition from Miocene marine environments to Late Holocene marshes, going through an intermediate period that includes fluvial gravels, alluvial sediments and shallow coastal deposits that characterize the maximum of the Fladrian transgression in this area (~6.5 cal kyr BP). These data and others contributed by historical sources allow an approximate reconstruction of this cove at the end of the 15th century. Image 1 • On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus departed from a cove in SW Spain. • Its sedimentary record includes the transit from a Miocene shelf to alluvial sediments. • Two geochemical peaks are related to the Flandrian transgression and Roman mining. • In 1492, the progressive filling hindered navigability in this cove. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]