Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero

[Toby Thain]

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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>