1. A method for deriving a style sheet from a document generated by an optical character recognition (OCR) description of a scanned document, the method comprising: receiving an OCR document, the OCR document being an electronic document generated by an OCR description of a scanned document and having text comprising a plurality of words, each word comprising one or more characters, each character having a character appearance defined by one or more font properties and each word having a word appearance defined by the font properties of its characters, the OCR document having one or more pages, and each word having a fixed position relative to one of the one or more pages; partitioning the text into a plurality of groups of words based on the fixed positions of the words relative to their respective pages, the font properties of the words, or both; assigning an element from a predefined set of markup language elements to each of two or more groups in the plurality of groups of words, the assigning being based on the fixed positions of the words relative to their respective pages, the font properties of the words, or both; after the element is assigned to each of two or more groups of words, deriving an element style for the assigned element, the element style comprising a character style, a layout style or both, the character style being derived from the font properties of the characters of the words in the two or more groups of words to which the element is assigned, and the layout style being derived from the text properties of the two or more groups of words to which the element is assigned; and creating an electronic document comprising a style sheet defining the element style.