Abstract: A library of templates defining the spacings between pre-printed lines and the corresponding line lengths for a plurality of different business forms is compared with the image data of an unknown document to determine the known business form (template) to which the document corresponds. Once the form of the document is determined, the optical character recognition system may intelligently associate the text characters in certain locations on the document with information fields defined by the pre-printed lines. The pre-printed lines in the image data are determined from the corresponding template and removed from the image data prior to optical character recognition processing.