  Page layout analysis is a fundamental step in document processing which
enables to segment a page into regions of interest. With highly complex layouts
and mixed scripts, scholarly commentaries are text-heavy documents which remain
challenging for state-of-the-art models. Their layout considerably varies
across editions and their most important regions are mainly defined by semantic
rather than graphical characteristics such as position or appearance. This
setting calls for a comparison between textual, visual and hybrid approaches.
We therefore assess the performances of two transformers (LayoutLMv3 and
RoBERTa) and an objection-detection network (YOLOv5). If results show a clear
advantage in favor of the latter, we also list several caveats to this finding.
In addition to our experiments, we release a dataset of ca. 300 annotated pages
sampled from 19th century commentaries.
