1. A character recognition apparatus, comprising: a character image extracting means for extracting character images from a text image; a candidate character selecting means for comparing the character images with standard characters for selecting a plurality of candidate characters with higher matching levels, and assigning first evaluation values to the candidate characters according to the matching levels; a character rectangle data dictionary for prestoring shape data of circumscribed rectangles of the standard characters; a character rectangle extracting means for extracting position data of the circumscribed rectangles of the character images extracted by the character image extracting means; a character rectangle shape data extracting means for extracting normalized shape data from the position data of the circumscribed rectangles of the character images extracted by the character rectangle extracting means; a character rectangle evaluating means for obtaining a second evaluation value for each candidate character by a certain computation using the normalized shape data extracted by the character rectangle shape data extracting means and the shape data stored in the character rectangle data dictionary; and a character determining means for determining a character among the plurality of candidate characters selected by the candidate character selecting means based on the first evaluation values and the second evaluation values.