of what machine-readers would be able to read in the future: only typewriter faces or also typefaces for book work or even handwriting? The people responsible at the time understood that there were two different worlds: the simpler shapes of letters typed on a typewriter – that was the reality we were dealing with – and the more complicated typographic shapes in bookprinting. Back in the 1960s, being able to machine-read books was still a dream. But we all agreed that this would be ideal. There was a fountain of ideas, we were even talking about automatic translation. But even the most far-sighted engineers wouldn’t have been able to predict desktop publishing. In the meetings I would always hand out photocopies of the drawings produced in my studio to each participant. Each of them would then go off and do their own maths in their respective companies and come up with a different result. Initially it was just some impenetrable gobbledygook for me when the engineers were discussing all their paper computer print-outs full of numbers, but after a while I began to understand what they were talking about. I never interfered with the finer details of the engineers’ work. If they came to the conclusion that part of a shape was too wide, too narrow, too high or too low, we would note the changes with a pencil on the drawings right there and then in the meeting. The translation into coordinates /20/ was carried out by the participating firms. For the readers the distance between the characters was very important /16/, each character had to be clearly separated from the next one. The shapes had to be clearly distinguishable too /11/. To check this there was the so-called ‘system curve of merit’: each character was compared with every other in the computer by superimposing them twoby-two /10/ based on the centreline /08/.
Machine-readable typefaces Initially the shapes of OCR typefaces (optical character recognition) were solely determined by the reading technology of computers. They had to be simplified or stylised. The only criterion was that of correct recognition. B ICR of the American Bankers The numerals face Association /04/ was part of the ‘first generation’ of stylised, machine-readable typefaces. It was based on a matrix of 7 by 10 cells. Another typeface for magnetic readers was C C- (Caractères Magnétiques Codés) /04/, developed in 1961 by the French Compagnie des Machines Bull. Its numerals and capitals were each constructed using seven strokes of constant weight whereas the counters varied. In 1961 a committee of the USA Standards Institute (USASI) agreed on the creation of OCR-A /02/ as a national standard for machine-readers. This typeface with its still extremely stylised shape based on a matrix of 5 by 9 cells /03/ belonged to the ‘second generation’. OCR-A was preceded by fonts from different manufacturers, including Farrington, NCR (National Cash Register) and IBM /05/. Initially it only contained numerals, capitals and a few special characters but was later extended to include lowercase letters as well. Together with OCR-B it was recommended by ISO in 1966. Like Adrian Frutiger’s typeface, Farrington L F /07/ belonged to the ‘third generation’ featuring a look that was more pleasing to the human eye.
/02/
/03/
The standard character set of OCR-A developed in the USA from 1961 onwards and given USASI standard status in 1966.
The computer-readable shape of the numeral 8 is based on a matrix of 5 by 9 cells in OCR-A, and 14 by 19 cells in OCR-B.
/04/
/05/
/06/
/07/
Stylised characters for the printing of banking forms with magnetic ink – E13B (top) USA and Canada; CMC-7 (bottom) Europe.
Progenitors of the numerals in OCR-A: Farrington 12F1, RCA, NCR C6000, IBM X9A-120, Remington Rand NS-69-8, Burroughs B2A, GE 59A-04, Farrington 7BI.
Machine-readable numerals and capitals, based on a grid of 7 by 9 cells – manufacturer unknown.
Farrington 12L/12F Selfchek – machine-readable character set by the credit card company Farrington Manufacturing Company.
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