17. An apparatus for segmenting portions of a medium representation into text and non-text types, said apparatus comprising: a memory for storing said medium representation, said medium representation including a plurality of scanlines, said plurality of scanlines being organized into a plurality of groups of scanlines; a processor, being coupled to said memory, said processor for compressing said plurality of groups into a plurality of compressed scanlines, said processor for generating a plurality of run lengths by extracting a run length from each compressed scanline in said plurality of compressed scanlines, said processor for generating a plurality of run length classifications by generating a run length classification for each run length in said plurality of run lengths according to a length of each run length, said processor for constructing a set of rectangles from said plurality of run lengths and said plurality of run length classifications, said processor for assigning a classification to each rectangle of said set of rectangles as non-text type or unknown type using said run length classifications associated with each rectangle, and said processor for generating a plurality of text blocks from a set of rectangles of said set of rectangles having an unknown type and for storing said plurality of text blocks in said memory.
17. An apparatus for segmenting portions of a medium representation into text and non-text types, said apparatus comprising: a memory for storing said medium representation, said medium representation including a plurality of scanlines, said plurality of scanlines being organized into a plurality of groups of scanlines; a processor, being coupled to said memory, said processor for compressing said plurality of groups into a plurality of compressed scanlines, said processor for generating a plurality of run lengths by extracting a run length from each compressed scanline in said plurality of compressed scanlines, said processor for generating a plurality of run length classifications by generating a run length classification for each run length in said plurality of run lengths according to a length of each run length, said processor for constructing a set of rectangles from said plurality of run lengths and said plurality of run length classifications, said processor for assigning a classification to each rectangle of said set of rectangles as non-text type or unknown type using said run length classifications associated with each rectangle, and said processor for generating a plurality of text blocks from a set of rectangles of said set of rectangles having an unknown type and for storing said plurality of text blocks in said memory. 23. The system of claim 17 wherein each rectangle, of said set of rectangles, having a text type corresponds to a single word.