Document image processing and huge understanding volumes of unprocessed, handwritten, and historical documents are critical challenges for many heritage and cultural institutes and organizations. Our main objective in document image processing and understanding is the development and implementation of novel models and techniques that may help generate, enhance, present, and understand handwritten document images. Direct involvement of scholars and researchers from various institutes and universities, such as McGill University, allowed us to choose goal-oriented directions for our research and development. Currently, our focus is on providing a complete understanding system that consists of imaging, pre-processing/enhancement, word-spotting, transliteration, and data mining units in a user-friendly collaborative.