Abstract: A facility is provided which determines the optimum phase of a sample clock signal that is used to acquire a copy of an image containing text. In particular, the phase of the sample signal is set to an initial value and is thereafter incremented by a predetermined amount of time following the acquistion of each of a predetermined number of copies of the image, in which each such copy is defined by respective pixel values. Upon acquiring a current copy of the image, a histogram is formed from ones of the pixel values and is stored in memory in place of a priorly stored histogram if the latest histogram contains more pixel values indicative of text than the priorly stored histogram. The phase of the sample clock signal is then adjusted to the phase associated with the histogram that is stored in memory following the last of such acquisitions.