This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Structural and Syntactical Pattern Recognition, SSPR '96, held in Leipzig, Germany in August 1996. The 36 revised full papers included together with three invited papers were carefully selected from a total of 52 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on grammars and languages; morphology and mathematical approaches to pattern recognition; semantic nets, relational models and graph-based methods; 2D and 3D shape recognition; document image analysis and recognition; and handwritten and printed character recognition.