This report describes work carried out at the Institute for the Study of the Languages and Culture of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) in the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies during 2001.  The work was within a project for the development and application of software to identify, extract, manipulate and analyze characters in a number of old text documents in Chinese and Japanese.  The project has led to the development of software tools and techniques for the isolation and extraction of characters, along with their coordinates; identification of characters; and analysis of the spatial characteristics of and between characters.