PURPOSE: To provide the optical character reader which effectively utlizes read data by retrieving information from the read data corresponding to emphasized characters.

CONSTITUTION: This reader is provided with an image detecting part 1, character segmenting part 3, feature extracting part 5, character recognizing part 7 and editing-outputting part 10. When the image detecting part 1 detects the image of a document, the character segmenting part 3 segments a character pattern from the detected image. The feature extracting part 5 extracts recognition information for character recognition and the identification information of emphasized characters from the segmented character pattern. The character recognition part 7 recognizes normal characters and the emphasized characters based on the extracted recognition information. When the recognized characters are the emphasized characters, the editingoutputting part 10 outputs the read data to which the identification information of emphasized characters is added.