Automatic Processing of Document Annotations

A common authoring technique involves making annotations on a printed draft and then typing the corrections into a computer at a later date. In this paper, we describe a system that goes some way towards automating this process. The author simply passes the annotated documents through a sheetfeed scanner and then brings up the electronic document in a text editor. The system then works out where the annotated words are and allows the author to skip from one annotation to the next at the touch of a key. At the heart of the system lies a procedure for reliably establishing correspondences between printed words and their electronic counterparts, without performing optical character recognition. This procedure might have interesting applications in document database retrieval, since it allows an electronic document to be indexed by a printed version of itself.