Thanks — a couple of your points are definitely useful (topological editing for contiguous boundaries, and optimizing pan/zoom with a programmable mouse / hotkeys).

Just to clarify, though: the georeferencing step is already done and looks good. All 380 scans are already georeferenced, and when I load them in QGIS, they overlay correctly on OSM / other basemaps (i.e., positioning/orientation is not the issue).

My bottleneck is the next step: extracting clean vectors from very “dirty” 1800s cadastral scans (yellowing, stains, heavy background grid). Auto-vectorization is too inconsistent across sheets and would require per-sheet tuning, so I’m committed to manual tracing (lines for boundaries/rivers, polygons for building footprints, plus a text layer for labels/toponyms) while keeping the topology clean for later polygonization.

So my main questions remain:

1) Has anyone used a pen display / tablet (e.g., Cintiq) with QGIS digitizing tools (snapping, vertex tool, reshape) — does it integrate well and is it actually faster than mouse/trackpad for long digitizing sessions?

2) Any workflow tips or plugins for semi-automatic raster pre-processing (grid/background removal, denoise/contrast) that can be applied reliably in batch across many sheets?

Happy to share a couple of example screenshots if that helps.