Optical Character Recognition is a

Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ad ...

containing signal characters for OCR and

MICR Magnetic ink character recognition code, known in short as MICR code, is a character recognition technology used mainly by the banking industry to streamline the processing and clearance of cheques and other documents. MICR encoding, called the '' ...

standards.

Block

Subheadings

The Optical Character Recognition block has three informal subheadings (groupings) within its character collection: OCR-A, MICR, and OCR.

OCR-A

The OCR-A subheading contains six characters taken from the

OCR-A OCR-A is a font created in 1968, 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. OCR-A uses simple, thick strokes to ...

font described in the ISO 1073-1:1976 standard: , , , , , and . The OCR bow tie is given the informative alias "unique asterisk".

MICR

The MICR subheading contains four punctuation characters for

bank cheque A cashier's check (or cashier's cheque, cashier's order) is a check guaranteed by a bank, drawn on the bank's own funds and signed by a cashier. Cashier's checks are treated as guaranteed funds because the bank, rather than the purchaser, is respo ...

identifiers, taken from the

magnetic ink character recognition Magnetic ink character recognition code, known in short as MICR code, is a character recognition technology used mainly by the banking industry to streamline the processing and clearance of cheques and other documents. MICR encoding, called the '' ...

E-13B font (codified in the ISO 1004:1995 standard): , , , and . The latter two characters are misnamed: their names were inadvertently switched when they were named in the 1993 (first) edition of

ISO/IEC 10646 ISO/IEC JTC 1, entitled "Information technology", is a joint technical committee (JTC) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Its purpose is to develop, maintain and pr ...

, a mistake which had been present since Unicode 1.0.0. Although their formal names remain unchanged due to the Unicode stability policy, they both have corrected normative aliases: U+2448 ⑈ is , and U+2449 ⑉ is (the standard notes that "the Unicode character names include several misnomers"). These symbols had previously been encoded by the ISO-IR-98 encoding defined by

ISO 2033 The ISO 2033:1983 standard (''"Coding of machine readable characters (MICR and OCR)"'') defines character sets for use with Optical Character Recognition or Magnetic Ink Character Recognition systems. The Japanese standard JIS X 9010:1984 (''"Codin ...

:1983, in which they were simply named through . All four characters have informative aliases in the Unicode charts: "transit", "amount", "on us", and "dash" respectively.

OCR

The OCR subheading consists of a single character: .

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Optical Character Recognition block:

References

{{reflist Unicode blocks