Sans-serif typeface
OCR-B
is a
monospace
font developed in 1968 by
Adrian Frutiger
for
Monotype
by following the
European Computer Manufacturer's Association
standard. Its function was to facilitate the
optical character recognition
operations by specific electronic devices, originally for
financial
and
bank
-oriented uses. It was accepted as the world standard in 1973.
[1]
It follows the
ISO
1073-2:1976 (E) standard, refined in 1979 ("letterpress" design, size I). It includes all
ASCII
symbols, and other symbols needed in the bank environment. It is widely used for the human readable digits in
UPC
/
EAN
barcodes.
[2]
[
citation needed
]
It is also used for
machine-readable passports
.
[3]
It shares that purpose with
OCR-A
, but it is easier for the
human eye
and brain to read and it has a less technical look than OCR-A.
History
[
edit
]
In June 1961, the
European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA)
started standardization activities related to
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
. After evaluating existing OCR designs, it was decided to develop two new fonts: A stylized design with just digits, called “Class A”; and a more conventional type design with broader character coverage, called “Class B”. In February 1965, ECMA proposed a design for the “Class B” font to
ISO
, who adopted it as international standard ISO 1073-2 in October 1965.
[4]
The first revision contained three font sizes: I, II and III. The specification included a
Letterpress
design, intended for high-quality printing equipment; and a rounded-edge
Constant Strokewidth
design for
impact printers
[5]
: 3
with reduced typographic quality.
In September 1969, ECMA started work to revise its published standard. To make OCR-B more widely accepted, the shapes of some characters were slightly modified. The new revision removed font size II, which had been rarely used in practice; it deleted five character shapes; and it added a new font size IV. ECMA published the second edition of OCR-B in October 1971.
[4]
In March 1976, ECMA published a third revision of its ECMA-11 specification. It added the symbols
§
and
¥
to OCR-B; two types of erasure marks (?) for blackening out mis-printed characters were added; and the length of the
Vertical bar
was changed to match ISO 1073-2.
[4]
In 1993, Turkey proposed extending ISO 1073-2 to include the Turkish letters
?
?,
?
ı, and
?
?.
The request was generalized to extend OCR-B with a number of Latin and Greek letters used in European languages.
[7]
: 27
A revision of the ISO 1073-2:1976 standard was therefore
started, producing three successive draft documents. The final draft would have extended OCR-B with 40 Latin and 10 Greek letters; for six Latin letters, the draft gave new alternate shapes.
[7]
: 26
A request to extend OCR-B with Vietnamese accents was rejected.
[7]
: 27
Other than previous versions of the standard, which specified glyph shapes via reference drawings, the new revision would have included the shapes in machine-readable form.
[7]
: 26
However,
industry support for testing the new font could not be secured at the time,
so the revision effort was halted in 1997.
[7]
: IV
The working group described their findings in a technical report.
[7]
: 1
In June 1998, the
European Committee for Standardization
published a report for adding the
Euro sign
to OCR-B.
[5]
The report proposed both a single-stroked and a double-stroked variant of the Euro sign, leaving the decision to further testing of OCR performance.
[5]
: 4
Testing was difficult: the theoretical design methods used when the OCR-B glyphs were originally developed could no longer be reproduced, and the technological constraints of the 1960s were also not entirely relevant anymore in the OCR environments of the 1990s.
[8]
A new test method was devised, using present-time OCR technology. The tests found no difference in OCR performance between the two Euro variants, and recommended the adoption of the double-stroked variant as it matches the conventional glyph shape.
[8]
The project did not have funds to thorougly test the glyph extensions of the 1993 proposal; initial results were inconclusive.
[8]
Availability
[
edit
]
Microsoft Office
ships a version of
Letterpress
OCR-B produced by
Monotype
. It covers
Windows-1252
.
[9]
Many vendors, including Adobe, still sell their versions of OCR-A and OCR-B.
The
TeX
typesetting system has a
public domain
Constant Strokewidth
OCR-B font in
METAFONT
definition form. It was created by Norbert Swartz in 1995 and updated in 2010. It has a setting for square stroke ends.
[10]
The definition has also been translated to
METATYPE1
, so the rounded version is available in
TrueType
and
OpenType
too.
[11]
A version of
Constant Strokewidth
OCR-B by Matthew Anderson has extended character coverage. It is available under
CC-BY 4.0
.
[12]
MS-DOS OCR-B encoding
[
edit
]
The MS-DOS OCR-B encoding is
code page 877
. Note that the grave, acute, circumflex (at 0x9B), tilde, diaeresis, and cedilla can be added over (in the case of the cedilla, under) letters to form accented letters.
Characters not in Unicode:
- ^a
Group erase (0x18)
- ^b
Character erase (0x7F)
References
[
edit
]
External links
[
edit
]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to
OCR-B
.
|
---|
Software
and libraries
| |
---|
Licenses
| |
---|
Operating system
,
corporate and
professional
| |
---|
Government
typefaces
| |
---|
Other
typefaces
| |
---|
Groups and
people
| |
---|
|
ISO
standards
by standard number
|
---|
|
1?9999
| |
---|
10000?19999
| |
---|
20000?29999
| |
---|
30000+
| |
---|
|