Are those Arabic OCR software open source and free? Having no Arabic OCR software has not prevented us from digitizing Arabic texts earlier. If only buying a $$$$ software gets you motivated to digitize arabic texts, then it is fine by me. However, I feel the arabic texts should be digitized first as image files. Specially if the text is written by hand. This apparoach will be cheaper and faster as well. Please don't make the mistage of not archiving and making available the images if you choose the OCR approach. I'm pleased to archive any arabic digitizations as image files for now and for future use. Only image files can preserve the text as close to original as possible. Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software