1. A method of distilling information from a hard copy business document to determine routing information for forwarding of an electronic version of business document to a destination, comprising: (a) electronically scanning a platen area of a digital scanner, having a business document thereon, to create a bitmap of the scanned platen area; (b) electronically converting, using an electronic circuit, the bitmap into a block of data, the block of data including lines of text, position information, text size information, and line separators; (c) segmenting the block of data into text lines, separators, and region objects; (d) assigning a lexical type to the segmented text lines based upon a predetermined set of regular expressions; (e) identifying, within the block of data, recipient information, using the assigned lexical type information and a stochastic context-free grammar model; (f) determining routing information corresponding to a destination associated with the identified recipient information; and (g) forwarding the electronic version of the scanned business document to the destination.
6. The method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the forwarded electronic version of the scanned business document is a portable document format document.