OCR-A font
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| Category | Sans-serif |
|---|---|
| Designer(s) | American Type Founders |
| Commissioned by | American National Standards Institute |
| Date released | 1968 |
| Variations | OCR-A Extended |
OCR-A is a font that arose 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 form recognizable characters. The font is monospaced (fixed-width), with the printer required to place glyphs 0.254 cm (0.10 inch) apart, and the reader required to accept any spacing between 0.2286 cm (0.09 inch) and 0.4572 cm (0.18 inch).
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. There is also a German standard for OCR-A called DIN 66008.
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.
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. In 2007, Gürkan Sengün created a Debian package from this implementation. In 2008. Luc Devroye corrected the vertical positioning in John Sauter's implementation, and fixed the name of lower case z.
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