Method of recognizing characters

1. Field of the Invention Characters of data on a document are recognized by automatically determining the definitions of characters of the data from the arrangement of character strings of the data. Character strings on the document are extracted by reading the document, and headers and data on the document are distinguished from each other by determining the positional relationship between the character strings. Character attributes of the data are determined by recognizing characters of the character strings of the headers using a header recognition dictionary. Characters of the character strings of the data are recognized according to the determined character attributes of the data. Since character attributes of the data are determined from recognized characters of the headers after the headers and the data are distinguished from each other from the layout on the document, it is possible to enter automatically the character attributes of the data.