Optical Character Recognition (Unicode block)

Short description: Unicode character block

Optical Character Recognition
Range	U+2440..U+245F (32 code points)
Plane	BMP
Scripts	Common
Symbol sets	OCR controls
Assigned	11 code points
Unused	21 reserved code points
Source standards	ISO 2033
Unicode version history
1.0.0	11 (+11)
Note:

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

Block

Optical Character Recognition 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.

OCR-A

Further information: 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

Further information: Magnetic ink character recognition

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, a mistake which had been present since Unicode 1.0.0. 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 (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. 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	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