Optical Character Recognition:

If stored as a graphic format, the text information contained in
the document is not recognized as such by the computer and cannot
be indexed or processed as a text file by the system user. To
directly index and process text data in a document, it must be
converted into ASCII format by an OCR (Optical Character Reader)
software program.  

The optical character recognition (OCR) software that works with
scanning devices to transcribe scanned text into machine readable
ASCII files has become increasingly more sophisticated and
accurate (and considerably less expensive).  The variety of
recognizable fonts and formats has broadened, and a good system
will typically accept 200 dpi scans of typeset, monospaced, dot
matrix and proportional fonts, and ligatures within a range of
6-20 point fonts.  The software comes with libraries of
predefined fonts, and can often be trained to recognize
additional fonts.  Advanced recognition capabilities allow some
OCR software to accept formatting commands such as italics and
underlines.  Hand scanners with less than full page scanning
capabilities require software that joins split page scans into
full page ASCII files.

<cfile49>   Scanners
<cfile52>   OCR Software
<dfile76>   PC-Hypertext: Information Acquisition