PURPOSE: To improve of read rate of hand-written characters and so on where horizontal projections of patterns are easy to overlap, by observing the boundary region of adjacent character patterns two-dimensionally and by cutting off left and right character patterns by a polygonal line as required.

CONSTITUTION: Output data of data processing device PPU1 has cutting-off line information, which cuts off one character, stored in cutting-off line memory 2 and the scanning signal of one-line components of the character pattern stored in line character pattern is stored in cut-off character pattern memory 11, and horizontal projections of characters of one-line components stored in memory 8 are checked by PPU1; and if the pattern is shift distributed in the horizontal direction for the predetermined cutting-off position, a polygonal cutting-off line is made with vertical line components as the partition and is stored in memory 2. The output of memory 2 is selected by multiplexer 14, and the pattern of one-character components interposed between polygonal lines is cut off from memory 11 and is supplied to the character recognizing circuit.