The invention discloses a method and a device for determining a typesetting direction of a character area. The method comprises the following steps: identifying all characters in a character area; Taking each character in all characters as the input of a neural network language model; wherein the feature parameters comprise the relative adjacent characters of each character and the occurrence probability of the relative adjacent characters, the neural network language model is obtained through machine learning training by using a plurality of groups of data, and each group of data in the plurality of groups of data comprises the characters and the feature parameters of the characters; Determining a typesetting direction of each character in all characters according to the characteristic parameters; And determining the typesetting direction of the character area based on the typesetting direction of each character. The technical problem that the typesetting direction of the character area cannot be obtained during image character recognition in the prior art is solved.