What you're looking for is Ocular Character Recognition or OCR for short. I've never managed to figure out its command line syntax, but I believe tesseract is considered the current standard option for Linux. There's also Cuneiform, which I have actually used with some success in the past, but I believe its either contrib or non-free under Debian, so you might need to enable extra repositories depending on how strict your distro is about sticking to FOSS principles. I will warn you, in my experience, OCR is as likely to produce gibberish as legible text. A scan of a page of prose type set in a standard font will probably OCR well, but the more mixed text is with graphics, the fancier the font, and the more complicated the page layout, the more likely errors are. I've tried OCR'ing scanlated manga(Japanese comics) in the past and have gotten results that included unpredictible patterns of letters and numbers misidentified as others(S and 5, P and D, I and 1, LI and U, B and g where just some of the common substitutions I encountered trying to fix the OCR'd text), characters my screenreader could'nt identify or identified as characters I'm unfamiliar, and even when the text was clear, paragraphs out of order wasn't uncommon. -- Sincerely, Jeffery Wright Bachelor of Computer Science President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa. _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list