The existence of characters with various font families or italic face will decrease the performance of character recognition significantly. This paper aims to improve the performance of a multi..font Chinese character recognition system. We first obtain the angle in italic..face characters. If the characters of a text line belong to the italic face, we straighten the characters in the text line. Then we determine the font family of the text line. If the family is Ming..font, which has more distinct features than other fonts to be extracted, we recognize the text line by the Ming..font kernel. In post..processing,we use font family information to adjust the recognition results and select the most promising recognition candidate. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed system.