n. The process of applying pattern-matching methods to character shapes that have been read into a computer to determine which alphanumeric characters or punctuation marks the shapes represent. Because different typefaces and text treatments, such as bold and italic, can make big differences in the way characters are shaped, character recognition can be prone to error. Some systems work only with known typefaces and sizes, with no text treatments. These systems achieve very high accuracy levels, but they can work only with text specifically printed for them. Other systems use extremely sophisticated pattern-matching techniques to learn new typefaces and sizes, achieving fairly good accuracy. See also magnetic-ink character recognition, optical character recognition, pattern recognition (definition 1).
