Abstract: A form reader especially for lottery forms with handwritten marks or bar codes includes a drum transport engaging the form, and a stepping motor advances the form circularly along a path around the drum, passing through a linear reading station elongated perpendicularly to the path. A light source illuminates the form at the read station and reflected light is incident on an elongated array of charge coupled device (CCD) light sensors via a focusing lens arrangement. An analog comparator coupled to a serial output of the CCD sensors digitizes encode and encodes each pixel in the elongated array repetitively during transport, sampling the reflectance of the form and defining an X-Y array of pixels. A digital processor coupled to an image memory analyzes the data for predetermined patterns such as handwritten marks, printed reference marks and/or printed bar code or OCR characters on the form.