PURPOSE: To prevent a hand-written character from being swollen from a recognition frame at the time of inputting to reduce erroneous recognition and to improve an input speed, that is, to improve the aspect of a human interface.

CONSTITUTION: The 1st character e.g. in a character string inputted by a user is recognized, after the recognized result is displayed, the coordinates of an input character start point and character size data are extracted (9a), and then the size of a recognition frame is determined based upon the extracted data (9b). Namely when x1 and y1 are respectively defined as the initial sizes in X and Y directions, these values are corrected to x2 and y2. The values x2, y2 can be made larger or smaller than the values x1, y1 in accordance with the inputted character size.