Abstract <p>Handwritten archival documents form a fundamental part of humanity’s cultural heritage. However, their analysis remains a labor-intensive task for professional researchers, including historians, philologists, and linguists. Working with historical manuscripts requires a fundamentally different approach from commercial OCR applications due to the extreme diversity of handwriting, the presence of corrections, and material degradation. This paper proposes a method for searching within handwritten texts based on stroke segmentation. Instead of performing full text recognition, which is often unattainable for historical documents, this method allows for efficiently answering researcher search queries. The key idea involves decomposing the text into elementary strokes, forming semantic vector representations using contrastive learning, followed by clustering and classification to create an adaptive handwriting dictionary. It is experimentally shown that search by comparing tuples of reduced sequences of the most informative strokes using the Levenshtein distance provides sufficient quality for the task at hand. This method demonstrates resilience to individual handwriting characteristics and writing variations, which is particularly important for working with authors’ archives and historical documents. The proposed approach opens up new possibilities for accelerating scientific research in the humanities, reducing the time required to find relevant information from weeks to minutes, thereby qualitatively transforming research capabilities when working with large archives of handwritten documents.</p>