Optical Character Recognition (Unicode block)

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

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

Block
Optical Character Recognition[1][2]
Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
 0123456789ABCDEF
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
Further information: 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 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
Further information: JIS X 9008

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:

VersionFinal code points[lower-alpha 1]CountL2 IDWG2 IDDocument
1.0.0U+2440..244A11(to be determined)
L2/10-416RMoore, 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"T.3. Optical Character Recognition", Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 58, 2012-01-03
  1. Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names

References
  1. "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2016-07-09.
  2. "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2016-07-09.
  3. "Unicode Code Charts: Optical Character Recognition" (PDF). The Unicode Standard, Version 6.3. Retrieved 27 February 2014.
  4. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2 (2012-01-03). "T.3. Optical Character Recognition". Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 58 (PDF). p. 29. SC2 N4188 / WG2 N4103. These Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) symbols are used by banks on checks. The names of these characters were inadvertently mixed up in the 1993 edition of ISO/IEC 10646.
  5. "3.8: Block-by-Block Charts" (PDF). The Unicode Standard. version 1.0. Unicode Consortium.
  6. Freytag, Asmus; McGowan, Rick; Whistler, Ken (2017-04-10). Known Anomalies in Unicode Character Names (4 ed.). Unicode Consortium. Unicode Technical Note #27.
  7. ISO/TC97/SC2 (1985-08-01). "ISO-IR-98: A set of 14 graphic characters of the E13B font" (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ.
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