Tokyo – April 7, 2026 – TOPPAN Holdings Inc. (TYO: 7911) (TOPPAN Holdings) and subsidiary TOPPAN Inc. (TOPPAN) have developed an AI-Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine that can decipher medieval Greek, a type of writing that is generally difficult to understand. Moving forward, thanks to a collaborative relationship with the Vatican Apostolic Library (Vatican Library), the Printing Museum, Tokyo (operated by TOPPAN Holdings) plans to scan images and digitized text from Greek manuscripts belonging to the Vatican Library. These will be used as learning data to refine accuracy, with the goal of increasing TOPPAN’s AI-OCR recognition accuracy to more than 95%. Visuals showing the findings of this approach will be displayed during the “How Masterpieces Are Born: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana â ¢+” special exhibition running from April 25, 2026, at the Printing Museum, Tokyo. TOPPANâs AI-OCR Engine Development Old texts hold a myriad of information regarding important historical facts and regional culture. However, many such texts are handwritten and are difficult to read for most people in the modern world. Correctly interpreting these texts to preserve culture is now an important challenge not only in Japan, but also on the global stage. For the past 30 years or so, the TOPPAN Group has been collaborating with the Vatican Library on several projects to safeguard culture for future generations. During that time the Vatican Library has released over two million items from part of its collection to the public for research and educational purposes in the form of IIIF1 high-resolution images. A total of nine million images were released, and that number continues to grow. Additional information such as transcriptions2 and annotations has been added to some of the Greek manuscripts, but experts in medieval Greek would need to work for a long period of time to complete the entire collection.