Even if all the fonts are rigorously identical the viewing conditions won&#x27;t be.  There will be plates seen at various angles, bent plates, dented plates, dirty plates etc.<p>I think that if you&#x27;re going to use a net you should try to train it in such a way that it learns to generalize the fundamental shape characteristics of the characters, much like the human visual system does, and that requires training with a wide range of different type of characters, all considered to be of the same class.<p>If you&#x27;re convinced that you only need to deal with identical characters you&#x27;re probably better off using some form of template matching.  But I think this is rarely the case for real world systems.