1. Optical character recognition apparatus comprising: means for optically scanning in a first direction a bar-coded human readable character having a predetermined pattern of bars and intervals of different opacities on a document, and producing a plurality of gray-scale pixel values corresponding to said pattern; memory means disposed for storing the gray-scale pixel values, said memory means including a stored program and a predetermined binary code for the character; and processing means coupled to the scanning means and to the memory means, and operating under control of the stored program, for specifying a segment of the character by selecting in a second direction perpendicular to said first direction from said gray-scale pixel values a first set of values representative of the segment, for producing a binary code corresponding to the first set of values, and for identifying the character by matching the produced binary code to the predetermined binary code.