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Optical Character Recognition (Unicode block)

From HandWiki - Reading time: 3 min

Short description: Unicode character block
Optical Character Recognition
RangeU+2440..U+245F
(32 code points)
PlaneBMP
ScriptsCommon
Symbol setsOCR controls
Assigned11 code points
Unused21 reserved code points
Source standardsISO 2033
Unicode version history
1.0.011 (+11)
Note: [1][2]

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

Block

Optical Character Recognition[1][2]
Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
  0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
U+244x
U+245x
Notes
1.^ As of Unicode version 13.0
2.^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points

Subheadings

The Optical Character Recognition block has three informal subheadings (groupings) within its character collection: OCR-A, MICR, and OCR.[3]

OCR-A

A partly redacted German cheque, showing use of ⑂, ⑀ and ⑁ in the machine-readable line

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

A British style cheque for a fictional bank, showing use of ⑆, ⑈ and ⑉ in the machine-readable line

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 the 1993 (first) edition of ISO/IEC 10646,[4] a mistake which had been present since Unicode 1.0.0.[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[lower-alpha 1] Count L2 ID WG2 ID Document
1.0.0 U+2440..244A 11 (to be determined)
L2/10-416R Moore, Lisa (2010-11-09), 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 Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 58, 2012-01-03 
L2/22-065 Whistler, Ken (2022-04-13), Editorial Committee Report and Recommendations for UTC #171Meeting 
  1. Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names

References




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