Abstract. In this paper we propose a new approach to improve electronic editions of literary corpus, providing an efficient estimation of manuscripts pages structure. In any handwriting documents analysis process, structure recognition is an important issue. The presence of variable inter-line spaces, of inconstant base-line skews, overlappings and occlusions in unconstrained ancient 19th handwritten documents complicates the structure recognition task. Text line and fragment extraction is based on the connexity labelling of the adjacency graph at different resolution levels, for borders, lines and fragments extraction. Key words: text lines and fragments extraction, graph, handwriting