1. A computer-implemented method of retrievably storing contents of a plurality of documents having images imprinted thereon comprising optically scanning the documents to form a digital representation of the images on the documents, storing the image representation of each document, establishing from images of the scanned documents a font table in image of alphanumeric characters in a plurality of different fonts each character in each font correlated with an equivalent character in code, searching for a document by the steps of interactively selecting a search word by a user, entering by a user the selected search word in code, machine-constructing an image of the selected search word from the font table in at least one font, comparing the constructed search word with the image representations of scanned documents until a match in a stored document image is found, and displaying an image thereof of the matched document.