The presentation reports on the on-going work to automatically process heterogeneous historical documents. After a quick overview of the general processing pipeline, a few examples are more comprehensively described. The recent progress in making large collections of digitised documents searchable is also be presented through the results of the automatic transcription of named entities in 18th century venetian fiscal documents. Finally, the case of the 1808 venetian cadaster is used to illustrate the general approach and the results of the processing of the whole 1808 cadaster are presented.