Gasp, you mean my brother was wrong? lol Can't say he & I have talked about the subject since around 1980. For all I know, he could have been talking about a potential machine & it was a strategy they were looking at to reduce noise (visual) & add speed.
Yes. there is a an unimplemented fax standard that DOES essentially, OCR a document, or create a typeface on the fly and transmit that and high-level description of a document. IIRC it is some optional part of the G4 standard, or maybe it is G5???
No fax machine I know of does this.
Telecom is chock full of standards that nobody uses and that are impractical to implement.