Optical Character Recognition (Unicode block)
Optical Character Recognition (Unicode block)
Optical Character Recognition is a Unicode block containing signal characters for OCR standards.
Block
| Optical Character Recognition[1][2] Official Unicode Consortium code chart [8] (PDF) | ||||||||||||||||
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | |
| U+244x | ⑀ | ⑁ | ⑂ | ⑃ | ⑄ | ⑅ | ⑆ | ⑇ | ⑈ | ⑉ | ⑊ | |||||
| U+245x | ||||||||||||||||
| Notes | ||||||||||||||||
Subheadings
The Optical Character Recognition block has three informal subheadings (groupings) within its character collection: OCR-A, MICR, and OCR.[4]
OCR-A
The OCR-A subheading contains six characters taken from the OCR-A font described in the ISO 1073-1:1976 standard: U+2440 ⑀ OCR HOOK, U+2441 ⑁ OCR CHAIR, U+2442 ⑂ OCR FORK, U+2443 ⑃ OCR INVERTED FORK, U+2444 ⑄ OCR BELT BUCKLE, and U+2445 ⑅ OCR BOW TIE. 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 (codified in the ISO 1004:1995 standard): U+2446 ⑆ OCR BRANCH BANK IDENTIFICATION, U+2447 ⑇ OCR AMOUNT OF CHECK, U+2448 ⑈ OCR DASH, and U+2449 ⑉ OCR CUSTOMER ACCOUNT NUMBER.
The latter two characters are misnamed (their names were inadvertently switched when they were named in ISO/IEC 10646:1993).[5] Although their formal names remain unchanged due to the Unicode stability policy, they both have corrected normative aliases: U+2448 ⑈ is MICR ON US SYMBOL, and U+2449 ⑉ is MICR DASH SYMBOL[6] (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 2033:1983, in which they were simply named SYMBOL ONE through SYMBOL FOUR.[7] 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: U+244A ⑊ OCR DOUBLE BACKSLASH.
History
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Optical Character Recognition block:
| Version | Final code points[1] | Count | L2 ID | WG2 ID | Document |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.0.0 | U+2440..244A | 11 | (to be determined) | ||
| L2/10-416R [9] | Moore, Lisa (2010-11-09), "Consensus 125-C39", UTC #125 / L2 #222 Minutes,Create two formal aliases, U+2448 MICR ON US SYMBOL and U+2449 MICR DASH SYMBOL for Unicode 6.1. | ||||
| N4103 [10] | "T.3. Optical Character Recognition", Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 58, 2012-01-03 | ||||