Documents serve to archive and communicate information. Document processing is the activity of operating on information captured in some form of persistent medium. Traditionally, that medium is paper, and documents are bundles of paper with information captured in print or in writing.

Document processing may serve to coordinate and conduct business transactions. When a customer submits an order to purchase a certain product, the order becomes a document for processing. The manufacturing company coordinates the activities of acquiring the raw materials, making the product, and finally delivering it to the customer with an invoice to collect payment—all by passing documents from one department to another, from one party to another.

Humans, endowed with the capacity to read, write, and think, are the principal actors in document processing. The invention of the modern digital computer, supported by various key technologies, has revolutionized document processing. Because information...