OCR-A is a font issued in 1966 and first implemented in 1968.Background on the OCR-A font from Adobe A special font was needed in the early days of computer optical character recognition, when there was a need for a font that could be recognized not only by the computers of that day, but also by humans.Motivation for OCR-A from Microscan OCR-A uses simple, thick strokes to form recognizable characters. The font is monospaced (fixed-width), with the printer required to place glyphs cm ( inch) apart, and the reader required to accept any spacing between cm ( inch) and cm ( inch)
Standardization The OCR-A font was standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as ANSI X3.17-1981. X3.4 has since become the INCITS and the OCR-A standard is now called ISO 1073-1:1976.
Implementations In 1968, American Type Founders produced OCR-A, one of the first optical character recognition typefaces to meet the criteria set by the U.S. Bureau of Standards. The design is simple so that it can be easily read by a machine, but it is more difficult for the human eye to read.
As metal type gave way to computer-based typesetting, Tor Lillqvist used Metafont to describe the OCR-A font. That definition was subsequently improved by Richard B. Wales. Their work is available from CTAN.The MetaFont sources for OCR-A from CTAN
To make the free version of the font more accessible to users of Microsoft Windows, John Sauter converted the Metafont definitions to TrueType using potrace and FontForge in 2004.John Sauter's 2004 OCR-A font from those MetaFont sources In 2007, Gürkan Sengün created a Debian package from this implementation.The fonts-ocr-a Debian packages, based on John Sauter's SourceForge project In 2008. Luc Devroye corrected the vertical positioning in John Sauter's implementation, and fixed the name of lower case z.Luc Devroye's account of his changes to John Sauter's implementation of OCR-A
Independently, Matthew SkalaMatthew Skala's home page used mftraceThe mftrace Debian package to convert the Metafont definitions to TrueType format in 2006. In 2011 he released a new version created by rewriting the Metafont definitions to work with METATYPE1, generating outlines directly without an intermediate tracing step. On September 27, 2012, he updated his implementation to version 0.2.Matthew Skala's 2012 OCR-A font from the MetaFont sources
In addition to these free implementations of OCR-A, there are also implementations sold by several vendors. As a joke, Tobias Frere-Jones in 1995 created Estupido-Espezial, a redesign with swashes and a long s. It was used in a "technology"-themed section of Rolling Stone.
Maxitype designed the OCR-X typeface—based on the OCR-A typeface with OpenType features, alien/technology-themed dingbats and available in six weights (Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Black).
Japanese typeface foundry Visual Design Laboratory (VDL) designed two typefaces based on the OCR-A typeface: one for Simplified Chinese characters named Jieyouti and one for Japanese characters named Yota G () , both available in five weights (Light, Regular, Medium, Semi Bold, Bold). Use
Although optical character recognition technology has advanced to the point where such simple fonts are no longer necessary, the OCR-A font has remained in use. Its usage remains widespread in the encoding of checks around the world. Some lock box companies still insist that the account number and amount owed on a bill return form be printed in OCR-A. Also, because of its unusual look, it is sometimes used in advertising and display graphics.
Notably, it is used for the subtitles in films and television series such as Blacklist and for the main titles in The Pretender. Additionally, OCR-A is used in the titles and subtitles for the films 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and Hoppers (film). It was also used for the logo, branding, and marketing material of the children's toy line Hexbug. It was also noticeably used in The Matrix and its respective sequels as its end credits font aswell as appearing in Agent Smith’s binder during the interrogation scene in the 1999 film.
Code points A font is a set of character shapes, or glyphs. For a computer to use a font, each glyph must be assigned a code point in a character set. When OCR-A was being standardized the usual character coding was the American Standard Code for Information Interchange or ASCII. Not all of the glyphs of OCR-A fit into ASCII, and for five of the characters there were alternate glyphs, which might have suggested the need for a second font. However, for convenience and efficiency all of the glyphs were expected to be accessible in a single font using ASCII coding, with the additional characters placed at coding points that would otherwise have been unused.
The modern descendant of ASCII is Unicode, also known as ISO 10646. Unicode contains ASCII and has special provisions for OCR characters, so some implementations of OCR-A have looked to Unicode for guidance on character code assignments.
Pre-Unicode standard representation The ISO standard ISO 2033:1983, and the corresponding Japanese Industrial Standard JIS X 9010:1984 (originally JIS C 6229–1984), define character encodings for OCR-A, OCR-B and E-13B. For OCR-A, they define a modified 7-bit ASCII set (also known by its ISO-IR number ISO-IR-91) including only uppercase letters, digits, a subset of the punctuation and symbols, and some additional symbols. Codes which are redefined relative to ASCII, as opposed to simply omitted, are listed below:
Character Image Location In ASCII Comments £ 0x23 # Matches BS 4730, the United Kingdom variant of ISO 646. { 0x28 ( Character name is still "LEFT PARENTHESIS", despite showing a brace. Usual left brace ASCII code 0x7B is omitted. } 0x29 ) Character name is still "RIGHT PARENTHESIS", despite showing a brace. Usual right brace ASCII code 0x7D is omitted. ⑀ 0x3C < ⑁ 0x3E > ¥ 0x5C \ Matches JIS X 0201. Included in JIS X 9010, but omitted by ISO 2033. ⑂ 0x5D ]
Additionally, the long vertical mark () is encoded at 0x7C, corresponding to the ASCII vertical bar (|).
Dedicated OCR-A characters in Unicode
The following characters have been defined for control purposes and are now in the "Optical Character Recognition" Unicode range 2440–245F:
+ Dedicated OCR-A code points based on ASCII and Unicode Name Image Text Unicode OCR Hook ⑀ U+2440 OCR Chair ⑁ U+2441 OCR Fork ⑂ U+2442 OCR Inverted fork ⑃ U+2443 OCR Belt buckle ⑄ U+2444 OCR Bow tie ⑅ U+2445
Space, digits, and unaccented letters
All implementations of OCR-A use U+0020 for space, U+0030 through U+0039 for the decimal digits, U+0041 through U+005A for the unaccented upper case letters, and U+0061 through U+007A for the unaccented lower case letters.
Regular characters In addition to the digits and unaccented letters, many of the characters of OCR-A have obvious code points in ASCII. Of those that do not, most, including all of OCR-A's accented letters, have obvious code points in Unicode. + Additional OCR-A code points based on ASCII and Unicode Name Glyph Unicode Exclamation Mark U+0021 Quotation Mark U+0022 Number Sign U+0023 Dollar Sign U+0024 Percent Sign U+0025 Ampersand U+0026 Apostrophe U+0027 Left Parenthesis U+0028 Right Parenthesis U+0029 Asterisk U+002A Plus Sign U+002B Comma U+002C Hyphen-Minus U+002D Full Stop (Period) U+002E Solidus (Slash) U+002F Colon U+003A Semicolon U+003B Less-Than Sign U+003C Equals Sign U+003D Greater-Than Sign U+003E Question Mark U+003F Commercial At U+0040 Left Square Bracket U+005B Reverse Solidus (Backslash) U+005C Right Square Bracket U+005D Circumflex Accent U+005E Left Curly Bracket U+007B Right Curly Bracket U+007D Pound Sign (Sterling) U+00A3 Yen Sign U+00A5 Latin Capital Letter A with Dieresis U+00C4 Latin Capital Letter A with Ring Above U+00C5 Latin Capital Letter AE U+00C6 Latin Capital Letter N with Tilde U+00D1 Latin Capital Letter O with Dieresis U+00D6 Latin Capital Letter O with Stroke U+00D8 Latin Capital Letter U with Dieresis U+00DC
Remaining characters LinotypeLinotype's OCR-A font: choose Character Map to see the characters and their coding coded the remaining characters of OCR-A as follows:
+ Additional OCR-A Characters Name Glyph Unicode Unicode Name Long Vertical Mark U+007C Vertical Line
Additional characters The fonts that descend from the work of Tor Lillqvist and Richard B. Wales define four characters not in OCR-A to fill out the ASCII character set. These shapes use the same style as the OCR-A character shapes. They are: + Additional ASCII characters Name Glyph Unicode Low Line U+005F Grave Accent U+0060 Vertical Line U+007C Tilde U+007E
Linotype also defines additional characters.Linotype's OCR-A Extended font: choose Character Map then Show all
Exceptions Some implementations do not use the above code point assignments for some characters.
PrecisionID The PrecisionID implementation of OCR-A has the following non-standard code points:PrecisionID User Guide for the PrecisionID implementation of the OCR-A font OCR Hook at U+007E OCR Chair at U+00C1 OCR Fork at U+00C2 Euro Sign at U+0080
Barcodesoft The Barcodesoft implementation of OCR-A has the following non-standard code points:Information page for the Barcode implementation of the OCR-A fontAnother source of information about the Barcode fonts OCR Hook at U+0060 OCR Chair at U+007E OCR Fork at U+005F Long Vertical Mark at U+007C (agrees with Linotype) Character Erase at U+0008
Morovia The Morovia implementation of OCR-A has the following non-standard code points:Information page for the Morovia implementation of the OCR-A font OCR Hook at U+007E (agrees with PrecisionID) OCR Chair at U+00F0 OCR Fork at U+005F (agrees with Barcodesoft) Long Vertical Mark at U+007C (agrees with Linotype)
IDAutomation The IDAutomation implementation of OCR-A has the following non-standard code points:Information page for the IDAutomation implementation of the OCR-A and OCR-B fonts OCR Hook at U+007E (agrees with PrecisionID) OCR Chair at U+00C1 (agrees with PrecisionID) OCR Fork at U+00C2 (agrees with PrecisionID) OCR Belt Buckle at U+00C3
Sellers of font standards Hardcopy of ISO 1073-1:1976, distributed through ANSI, from Amazon.com ISO 1073-1 is also available from Techstreet, who distributes standards for ANSI and ISO
See also Magnetic ink character recognition Optical character recognition Westminster (typeface), a typeface designed to resemble the visual appearance of MICR. OCR-B
Notes
External links
Introductory article about OCR fonts Link standard ANSI INCITS 17-1981 (R2002) Background on ISO work involving OCR-A Unicode code charts IBM GCGID mapping