Optical Character Recognition (Unicode block)


Optical Character Recognition is a Unicode block containing signal characters for OCR standards.

Block

Subheadings

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

OCR-A

The OCR-A subheading contains six characters taken from the OCR-A 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 identifiers, taken from the magnetic ink character recognition E-13B font :,,, and.
The latter two characters are misnamed. 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 .
These symbols had previously been encoded by the ISO-IR-98 encoding defined by ISO 2033:1983, 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: