[kupoartist]

What an obscure and really interesting thing you're trying to do What you're trying to do is a process called OCR, Optical Character Recognition. Basically what happens, is you scan an image of a page of text, and a OCR program will look at the image and try to match symbols in the image with those of an alphabet. Then you get a page of text which can be copy / pasted into something like word.

Unfortuantly though, you need a special program. The one I use is called ABBYY FineReader. It came with my scanner. Unfortuantly x2 is that if you want it to recognise Japanese kana, you're going to need a VERY special program!

With enough research, you could perhaps find something. I tried searching for "Japanese OCR Program" in google, and it came up with this page, which seemed somewhat relevant. Did you plan to the translate the text yourself, or get a program to do that for you? The Babelfish translator (www.altavista.com) will translate from Japanese to English... badly but for free (though it may be a starting point - you'd probably have to actually put the text on the net to be able to feed it into babelfish... give me a shout if it ever comes to that and i could put it on my webspace). An actual software product for the job would probably cost money... and a lot of it i'd imagine (though your results would probably be a little more successful.)