Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Document Analysis Systems, DAS 2006, held in Nelson, New Zealand, in February 2006. The 33 revised full papers and 22 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on digital libraries, image processing, handwriting, document structure and format, tables, language and script identification, systems and performance evaluation, and retrieval and segmentation.