Hi All, I needed to scan a document. Unfortunately, i had no scanner. :( I then realized that I have a webcam staring at me, i have mplayer and sure enough mplayer -tv driver=v4l2 tv:// -vf screenshot gives me a legible copy on pressing s! Scanner el cheapo! So to the universirty students, - Make a scanner from the webcam (Proof concept is already done) You can use pygtk, python-v4l2 <http://code.google.com/p/python-v4l2/> and of course python - Use http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ to make a cheap ocr plugin for your scanner. A sample binding http://code.google.com/p/pytesser/already exists (I wouldn't try that.. It didn't work for me)