First I replaced all the gallows with the character "G" and the other with "
" to find the biggest area without gallows. The size of this area was 10
colums by 10 rows.
Did you do this visually or algorithmically?
IIRC, Jim Reeds constructed a database containing character (x,y) page
positions as part of his VMS OCR scanning exercise, though I don't ever
remember seeing this exposed on the Web: did you use (or consider using) this?