7. The optical information reading method according to claim 6 wherein the adding includes adding the widths of the elements containing the character bars and the spaces of the characters before and after the target character when obtaining each of the 2- through n-element added widths of the target character.
7. The optical information reading method according to claim 6 wherein the adding includes adding the widths of the elements containing the character bars and the spaces of the characters before and after the target character when obtaining each of the 2- through n-element added widths of the target character. 8. The optical information reading method according to claim 7 wherein the extracting includes extracting the n-element width data of said one character and at least one anteroposterior width data of the target character when obtaining each of the 2- through n-element added widths.