Displacement correction device for machine reading of characters

The device has a scanner which measures the darkness of the characters in an optical range. The scanner or an additional device converts the continually measured darkness into black-and-white pixels. Another device carries out displacement correction of the characters converted into black pixels. The displacement correction is carried out by horizontal and/or vertical shearing of the characters, character lines or character fields. A horizontal shearing is carried out line-by-line with the values of j tan alpha added as integer values to the column indices of the black pixels. A vertical shearing is carried out column-by-column with the values of k tan alpha added as integer values to the line indices of the black pixels; j is the space between lines; k is the distance between columns; alpha is the angle by which the displacement correction should be carried out.