Both fonts follow the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). If you compare the fonts above you will immediately recognize the readability of OCR-B. OCR-A didn’t enjoy great popularity in Europe and therefore Frutiger designed a new version for the European Computer Manufacturer’s Association (ECMA). He was best known for the design of the fonts Universe, Frutiger, and Avenir. Development of OCR-BĪdrian Frutiger was one of the most important typographers. OCR-A is readable by a human being but the shape of the characters is not natural and, therefore, not comfortable to read.
However, the second requirement was a bit neglected. Because of the special character of each letter and the resulting distinction, the font is optimized for machine readability. Franklin Gothic, Bank Gothic) to design the OCR-A font. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) hired the highly esteemed American Type Founders (e.g. The font had to be perfectly readable by machines and computers, but it also had to be readable by the human eye. Back in 1968 when the fonts were introduced, two important requirements had to be accomplished.
Ladies & gentlemen, please welcome AnyOCR! The History of OCR FontsĮveryone who works in the field of Optical Character Recognition, specifically text recognition, is confronted with the traditional fonts OCR-A and OCR-B. And that’s exactly what we – together with the design team around the Multigenre Bureau “laut aber leise” – did. There was some heavy optimization needed to form the perfect team, made of OCR technology and this new OCR font. But that was before you’ve seen our new OCR font. Some of you might ask yourself “Why design a new OCR font? The technology that exists is good enough to read non-OCR-optimized fonts as well!” You might also think that there have already been two OCR fonts for the past 50 years and the world is overloaded with fonts in general.