Patent ID: 8225205

Claim:
An electronic document processing apparatus comprising: an extracting unit constructed to extract a plurality of text strings from an electronic document containing layout information; a detecting unit constructed to detect a baseline of each of the extracted text strings; a providing unit constructed to provide, for each of the extracted text strings, a first line segment extending forward from the baseline and a second line segment of a different type from the first line segment extending backward from the baseline; a concatenation determining unit constructed to determine that a pair of the text strings are to be concatenated when determining that the first line segment provided for one text string of the pair and the second line segment provided for the other text string of the pair overlap or intersect; a grouping unit constructed to group text strings that are determined to be concatenated into a single group; and an order determining unit constructed to determine an order of the text strings by sorting the groups of the text strings based on coordinates detected from the groups of the text strings.