Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero
Toby Thain
toby at telegraphics.com.au
Wed Apr 27 08:26:19 CDT 2022
On 2022-04-27 9:14 a.m., Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>
> ...
> Re OCR-B: the difference between zero and O in that font is small enough that contemporary OCR could not reliably tell the two apart. This is documented in detail in "Travels in Computerland" by Ben R. Schneider, a book about his project to digitize a multi-volume printed document in the early 1970s. It involved having it typed (in Hong Kong I think) using OCR-B type balls, and when they ran into the OCR issue it was worked around by modifying the type balls to give one of the two characters a cut in the left side, making it like a reversed C. OCR sure has come a long way since then.
Since OCR-B has been mentioned people might be interested in this paper
on its development:
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/doc/scarrott.html
--Toby
>
> Yes, OCR-A is extremely ugly; Schneider actually considered it before dismissing it, on the grounds its letter forms are so bad that proofreaders trying to check the as-typed material would have a hard time dealing with it and quality would suffer as a result.
>
> paul
>
>
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