12. The method according to claim 11, wherein said deciding step, in a case where the discriminated orientations agree in a plurality of characters whose orientations have been discriminated in said character orientation discriminating step to a predetermined reliability or higher, includes further deciding upon this orientation as the orientation of the document image data.
13. The method according to claim 12, wherein said deciding step includes counting a number of times discrimination could be performed in said character orientation discriminating step with regard to each character orientation, and further deciding upon a document orientation, for which the value of the count is maximum, as being the orientation of the document image data.