I am making slow progress on my roll punch project. I guess I'm putting
the cart before... since I still don't know how I am going to capture
roll data.  I feel more comfortable with the more mechanical aspects of
the punch which is why I'm doing the punch first.

I had another idea for a possible scanner and would like feedback and
possible colaboration on the approach if anyone is interested.

Small hand held scanners, such as those made by Logitec, use a line CCD
and have TWAIN output. They have a roller / encoder than translates
travel over the paper being scanned,  into pulses, which are used to
determine when to clock a line a line from the CCD. Why not  use this
point (it is just an IR LED and photo transistor) to control line
scanning, and input the data into a file for later processing into note
locations? The optics would have to be modified or replaced to cover a
typical roll width, but the resolution should be more than adequate (up
to 1600 dots over the scan width.) A narrow illuminated slot would be
used to define the vertical line height and a stepper motor would be
used to advance the paper. The B&W mode could probably be used to
minimize file size or maybe a few more bits would be necessary. Maybe a
reflective version of the same scheme would be better.

My questions are: Is there software available (I can't find any) that
could be used to read the line information output by the scanner into a
file of a usable format, or can it be written easily? There are TWAIN
packages advertised that have DLLs and such but they don't specify what
the modules do? They are also quite expensive.

Has anybody done or tried this and what have the results been? It seems
like it could be a real cheap way to make a scanner available to the
masses. I have a scanner candidate that I would like to experiment on
but I don't want to spend the time if I am going to run into a software
block.

So what do the techno wizards have to say?  Is this another hair brained
scheme, or does it have a snowball's chance?