Research of Artificial Neural Networks Abilities in Printed Words Recognition This paper provides a brief overview on document analysis and recognition area, highlighting main steps and modules that are used to build recognition systems of the mentioned type. We underline basic workflow of such system down to the problem of single character recognition problem and highlighting possibilities and ways for artificial neural networks usage. Further we are conducting a formal comparison of abilities of printed characters recognition between two well known types of second generation neural networks, namely feedforward back-propagation multilayer perceptron (MLP) and Kohonen self-organizing features map (SOM).