Nowadays, it is becoming increasingly important to have information available forrnexamination and manipulation in digital format, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR)rnis being recognized as one of valuable instruments in this respect. OCR systems takernrnoptical images of a handwritten or printed material, and by recognizing the characters thatrnmake up the material, automatically convert the text in the material into digital format forrnfurther processing and manipulation - thereby bypassing the labour-intensive and error pronernas well as time consuming process of keying.rnWhile the use and application of OCR systems seems to have been well developed inrnlanguages that use scripts based on Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Bangia, to mention but a few,rnthere is not as yet any effort in this direction for the Amharic language.rnThis study is an attempt to approach the development of an Amharic OCR system byrndrawing experience elsewhere - to investigate the extent to which suggested OCRrnalgorithms to work with other scripts would apply to recognizing Amharic characters. Tornthis end, algorithms suggested for use in other languages are reviewed from publishedrnliterature. The Amharic writing system is described in terms of size, shape, style, etc.rnAlgorithms of general appeal to the Amharic character recognition are selected.rnExperimentation with a step-by-step segmentation and recognition based on topologicalrnfeatures of Amharic characters is presented. Recommendations are also made to further thernexperiment and enhance the performance and applicability of the selected algorithms.