Typeface · Other
OCR-A
OCR-A is a font issued in 1966 and first implemented in 1968.
About OCR-A
OCR-A is a font issued in 1966 and first implemented in 1968. A special font was needed 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)
From the Wikipedia article “OCR-A”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Using OCR-A in a book
Test this typeface at both text and display sizes before committing; print a sample page at final size.
Commercial typefaces require a licence that covers embedding in PDFs and ebooks; check the foundry's licence before you publish.
Sources & data
- Structured data from Wikidata Q682579 (CC0).
- Summary text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).