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From: krisk@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Kris Klindworth)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: What medium will be readable in 25 years?
Keywords: fonts
Message-ID: <1991May9.200028.5707@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 9 May 91 20:00:28 GMT
References: <8144@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> <1991May8.125205.18204@scrumpy@.bnr.ca>
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 22

In article <1991May8.125205.18204@scrumpy@.bnr.ca> bnrmtl!lewis@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu writes:
>
>Paper seems to be a favorite solution.  What font should one choose so as
>to maximise legibility for OCR soft- or hardware?
>

According to Burke's Handbook of Bar Coding Systems, the National 
Retail Merchants Assocation developed the OCR-A font to maximize
machine readability.  They basicly distorted each of the characters
to make them as different from each other as posible while
still looking vaguely familiar to humans.  This is the font you see 
on price tags at you local JCPennies.  

The good news is that OCR software can usually correctly identify 
even partial characters :).  The bad new is that its ugly and
the alphanumeric character set appears to be upper case only :(.

-- 
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