1. An optical recognizing apparatus comprising: a pattern memory for storing the patterns of characters and the pattern of an underline, which are obtained by photoelectrically converting underlined characters printed on a sheet of paper; underline detecting means for detecting the patterns of the underline by scanning the patterns in said pattern memory, and for storing the positions of the detected underline patterns; underline erasing means for writing white data in the underline pattern region of said pattern memory to erase the underline pattern in accordance with the positions stored in said underline detecting means; recognizing means for reading the character patterns from said pattern memory wherein the underline pattern has been erased by said underline erasing means, and for recognizing the character patterns read from said pattern memory; and means for editing and producing the positions of underline pattern supplied from said underline detecting means and the recognition result supplied from said recognizing means.