This paper investigates the problem of cross document image retrieval, i.e. use of query images from one style (say font) to perform retrieval from a collection which is in a different style (say a different set of books). We present two approaches to tackle this problem. We propose an effective style independent retrieval scheme using a nonlinear style-content separation model. We also propose a semi-supervised style transfer strategy to expand the query into multiple styles. We validate both these approaches on a collection of word images which vary in fonts/styles. © 2014 IEEE.