In this paper we propose a complete methodology of printed text characterization for document labeling using texture features that have been inspired by a psychovisual approach. This approach considers visual human-based predicates to describe and identify text units according to their visual saliency and their perceptual attraction power on the reader’s eye. It supports a quick and robust process of functional labeling used to characterize text regions of document pages. The test databases are the Finland MTDB Oulu base1 that provides a great panel of document layouts and contents and our laboratory corpus that contains a large variety of composite documents (about 200 pages). The performance of the method gives very promising results.