Those last years, one can observe that the number of digital libraries has clearly increased but not as fast as the number of tools to promote the cultural heritage stored in those libraries. Among the great diversity of cultural inheritage we can notice that handwritten documents constitute an important part of ancient collections to valorise. In those document images, we are not interested in handwriting recognition and semantic content, but we focus on image content retrieval through visual low level characteristics of shapes (from graphemes to entire handwriting samples). In this work, we are interested in digitized Middle-Age (composed by copyists’ texts from the 9th to the 15th century), Humanistic manuscripts (essentially composed by authors’ drafts from the 18th and 19th century) and overall lines based images.