The present invention discloses a system and a method for selecting,
accessing and retrieving directly from a physical (i.e., hard-copy)
document, hypertext documents located on a user workstation or on one or
a plurality of servers connected to a communication network, and for
displaying the retrieved hypertext documents over said physical document.
The information is accessed by the user simply by touching with a finger
items (i.e., words, letters, symbols, pictures, icons, . . . ) that are
highlighted on an electronic hypertext document displayed over the
physical document. The method, for use in a user system comprises the
steps of: --identifying a physical document, this physical document
comprising one or a plurality of pages; --identifying a page of said
physical document; --identifying and locating an electronic document
associated with the identified page referring to a document hyperlink
table; said document hyperlink table comprising for each page of the
physical document the identification and location of an electronic
document; --accessing and retrieving the electronic document associated
with the identified page; --displaying the retrieved electronic document
by means of an opto-touch foil placed over the identified page.