> that is, are there any packages that will enable one to use a scanner > that is able to read in characters, or in other words, uses OCR > (optical character recognition) technology?
It depends on the scanner you have. I've a HPScanJet4c connected to a SCSI card and i'm using hpscanpbm, which is available as a standard Debian package. It works quite well for me. Alfons Juan
