There is a widening gap between the creation of visual content and its analysis and interpretation by machine, an increasingly essential require-ment for correct indexing and filtering. In the case of the WWW, for instance, although there are efficient methods to process the encoded (e.g. ASCII) text, there are no such methods for the (significant) visual content. This paper focuses on the methods developed by the authors to address the problem of extracting the characters from WWW images containing text.