In this paper, we present a general method to segment and recognize pairs of touching and overlapping symbols. The method, whose purpose is to lead to a generic approach in future works, is based on the evaluation of several segmentation candidates produced by grouping elements of an over-segmentation. A pure general method would involve a high number of segmentation candidates. An adaptive introduction of heuristics, representing the knowledge dedicated to the applicative domain, allows to decrease this number. We have largely tested the method on pairs of touching and overlapping digits.