Patent Document ID: 5444840
Application ID: 08361846

Base Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method of retrievably storing contents of a plurality of documents having images imprinted thereon comprising optically scanning the documents to form a digital representation of the images on the documents, storing the image representation of each document, establishing from images of the scanned documents a font table in image of alphanumeric characters in a plurality of different fonts each character in each font correlated with an equivalent character in code, searching for a document by the steps of interactively selecting a search word by a user, entering by a user the selected search word in code, machine-constructing an image of the selected search word from the font table in at least one font, comparing the constructed search word with the image representations of scanned documents until a match in a stored document image is found, and displaying an image thereof of the matched document.

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Claim 2:
2. A method according to claim 1 wherein the digital representation of each document includes a plurality of pixel lines forming lines of characters in the image, and wherein the step of selecting search words includes evaluating the first pixel line in each character line to detect characters having the height characteristics of capital letters, evaluating each detected character to determine if it is a capital letter, and employing the results of the evaluation in selecting search words.