A character recognition scanner is vertically centered on a line of characters by horizontally compressing or consolidating the character parts in the field of view of the scanner and using the horizontally consolidated character parts as a cue to vertically adjust the scanner. The horizontally consolidated character parts are stored in a shift register by a series of bits and the positions of the series of bits in the shift register corresponds to the position of the character parts in the field of view of the scanner. By shifting the data in the shift register in coincidence with the vertical adjustment of the scanner, the data in the shift register serves as a continuous cue of the position of a character within the adjusted field of view. The vertical adjustment of the scanner is then stopped when the series of bits representing a character is at a predetermined position within the shift register.