Abstract
For a long time, automatic reading has been limited to optical character recognition. one year ago, except for one high end product, all industrial software or hardware products where limited to the reading of mono-column texts without images. This does not correspond to real life needs. In a current, company, pages which need to be transformed into electronic form are not only typewritten pages, but also complex pages from professional magazines, technical manuals, financial reports and tables, administrative documents, various directories, lists of spare parts etc... The real problem of automatic reading is to transform such complex paper pages including columns, images, drawings, titles, footnotes, legends, tables, occasionally in landscape format, into a computer text file without the help of an operator. Moreover, the problem is to perform this operation at an economical cost with limited computer resources in terms of processor and memory.
