1. A method of recognizing italic text in a optical character recognition system comprising: creating a plurality of digital images of alphanumeric characters from a block of text, each comprising a plurality of rows of digital pixels; preprocessing the digital images such that each image is normalized to equal size and the pixels within each image have a first value or a second value; determining the position of the left-most pixel with a first value in each row for each image; recording the position of each left-most pixel with a first value as a ordered pair including the row number and ordinal position within the row; calculating a best fit line and a corresponding slope for the ordered pairs via linear regression; and comparing the calculated slope to a predetermined threshold.