The purpose of this work is to develop automatic techniques for converting linear, paper-based documents to a non-linear format suitable for use in hypertext systems. The selected document was partially converted to hypertext manually, and a prototype was created using the rules derived from the manual conversion process. The full conversion was divided into three passes: correcting the electronic linear form of the document, generating a listing of the links in the document, and creating the hypertext document. Passes 2 and 3 were entirely automatic. From this study, it may be concluded that many classes of paper-based documents can be automatically converted to hypertext.