A forms creation and processing system which identifies and locates the active areas of a form using forms landmarks. The present invention eliminates the need to place predefined registration marks onto a machine readable form. The active areas of a form are those which may contain a user created mark, such as a checkbox or a signature box. A form is preanalyzed at the same time that the active areas are being described. The aim of the preanalysis is to find a set of graphic shapes, i.e. landmarks, that can be found on the form independent of their location or orientation in the image. Examples of such landmarks include paragraphs of text, heavy black lines and gray scale areas. The analysis looks at the geometric distribution and regularities of the connected components to choose a set of landmarks. The landmarks and active areas on the form are stored in a forms control file. A forms interpreter uses the forms control file to locate and examine the active areas of an instance of a form to determine if a mark has been placed thereon.