Scanners:

Hand held scanners show promise as inexpensive and portable data
acquisition devices.  Desk top scanners have similar capabilities
as the hand held models, with the obvious exception that they can
scan larger areas of copy.  Desk top scanners are not subject to
the variables of the hand manipulated device, but neither do they
allow the same application flexibility, nor are they as portable.

A scanned document database consists of bit mapped digital images
of the source documents.  In many applications, an image of a
source document stored in a graphic file format and retrieved
through a reference index may fulfill data acquisition and
storage requirements.  Graphic files and component elements can
be processed using a raster type graphic editors such as TIPS or
PC Paintbrush.  Graphic elements can also be converted by
software to a vector format that is compatible with computer
aided design (CADD) systems.  

<cfile47>   Frame Grabbers
<cfile50>   Scanner Equipment
<cfile51>   Optical Character Recognition
<cfile52>   OCR Software