1. An apparatus for recognizing characters, comprising: character width detecting means which measures the width of a character; first normalizing means which normalizes said character in the directions of height and width; second normalizing means which normalizes the character in the direction of height only when said measured width value is smaller than a preset value; first and second comparator means which compare and collate the normalized characters obtained by the first and second normalizing means with a reference; and recognition means which selects a category of the reference, having a higher coincidence degree as a recognition basis.