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.
Thank you. That all makes sense now. He got his degree in '76 & for all I know he was thinking about making a prototype. Those were days where there were a lot of different limits (by current standards). Memory, speed & storage have taken huge leaps since then, so yeah, that kind of standard would be antiquated by now.