Abstract: A method for a computer system for transmitting a facsimile to an electronic destination, includes receiving the facsimile comprising an instruction page with an optical representation of the electronic destination address and an optical representation of a user selection of an option, and a document encoded in a fax format, determining the electronic destination address from the optical representation of the electronic destination address, wherein the electronic destination address need not be known to the computer system before receiving the facsimile, determining the one selected option in response to the optical representation of the user selection of the option, determining a modified document in response to the document and in response to the one selected option, encoding the modified document into a second transmission format, and transmitting the modified document and additional service provider data encoded in the second transmission format to the electronic destination address.

Abstract: A method for a computer system includes receiving a first facsimile transmission from a user, wherein the first facsimile transmission includes a digitized representation of a first document transmitted using a facsimile transmission format, processing the digitized representation of the first document with an optical character recognition process to determine a first destination e-mail address, wherein the first destination e-mail address need not be known to the computer system a priori, reformatting at least a portion of the digitized representation of the first document into an e-mail attachment format, determining advertisement data in response to the first facsimile transmission, forming an e-mail message addressed to the destination e-mail address, wherein the e-mail message includes a body portion and an attachment portion, wherein the body portion comprises the advertisement data, and wherein the attachment portion comprises the portion of the digitized representation of the first document in the e-m

Abstract: A method for a computer system for transmitting a facsimile to an e-mail destination, comprises receiving a facsimile transmission comprising an instruction page and a document page, wherein the instruction page includes an optical representation of an e-mail address, using an optical character recognition process to determine the e-mail address from the optical representation of the e-mail address, wherein the e-mail address need not be known to the computer system before receiving the facsimile transmission, converting the facsimile transmission into an e-mail attachment, and sending an e-mail message including the additional service provider data and the e-mail attachment to the e-mail address, wherein the additional service provider data is selected from a group consisting of: a service provider identifier, a service sponsor identifier.

Abstract: A system that compensates for uneven lighting in a digital image of a surface. During operation, the system receives the digital image of the surface. Next, the system obtains a reference lighting map for the surface, which contains information about the lighting of the surface at the time the digital image was acquired. The system then uses the reference lighting map to compensate for uneven lighting in the digital image.

Abstract: Methods and apparatus of processing, storing and transmitting an original data stream of digitized speech samples. The method converts a stream of digitized speech samples to a stream of text and associated reliability measures. A mixed-media data stream is created with the stream of text as a text component and selected portions of the digitized stream of speech as a speech component. The selected portions are those whose corresponding reliability measures fall below a threshold. The threshold can be changed to change the amount of storage or bandwidth used by the mixed-media data stream. The mixed-media data stream can be searched and the results can be spoken as synthetic speech derived form the text component or as speech samples taken from the digitized speech component.

Abstract: Method and apparatus for filtering non-text information from a page containing text, the text being associated with a color. The page is represented as an image in a first color space. The image is converted to a second color space that has a color channel closely associated with the text color. The color channel is selected and gray values are derived that correspond to text color channel values associated with cells in the image. Cells in the image having gray values of a predefined relationship with respect to predetermined threshold values are marked as text cells, and the remaining cells are identified as non-text cells. The gray values of the text and non-text cells are adjusted to increase the contrast between text and non-text information. The single-color space image may then be printed by a monochrome printer.

Abstract: A graphical pattern placement technique automatically performed by a computer whereby lying in a single plane a path on an electronic document is provided and a graphical pattern is selected. Then, the graphical pattern is automatically placed along the path by a programmed computer such that the graphical pattern follows the orientation and curvature of the path.

Abstract: A reader for displaying an electronic document stored in a predetermined format and allowing articles of the document to be read in the direction of their content information flow. The reader includes a selector to select an article of the document to be read. A displayer displays a first portion of the article in a manner which promotes comfortable viewing, and a navigator permits the display of the next and remaining sequential portions of the article in content flow (or reverse content flow) order. Preferably, the displayer pans and zooms, as necessary, to position the article portion in an article viewing window.

Abstract: The invention describes a method for reconstructing characters in a document, which are expressed in one or more fonts, to convert the characters to a different font designed to closely match characters from a plurality of fonts in an aesthetically pleasing manner. This is accomplished by first selecting a first character from the document and thereafter substituting for the first character the same character constructed from the different font and having the same width as the first character, the characters of varying widths within the different font being designed to have aesthetically pleasing relationships between their parts irrespective of width.

Abstract: The invention provides a method for selecting the intensity level of each of the primary colors for displaying or printing a predetermined, desired color to be composed of a specified percent of each of the primary colors. Each primary color has available a predetermined number of discrete intensity levels ranging from minimum to maximum and is to be displayed on a matrix having a predetermined number of cells. The first step in the method is to determine a desired intensity level for each primary color and to select the number of cells of the matrix which are to display that color at that intensity level. These cells of each primary color are then arranged in the matrix in a predetermined ordering to display the desired color. The sequence of the ordering is predetermined and the same for each primary color.