Slashed letter O, unslashed letter zero

[Diane Bruce]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 07:48:36PM -0700, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> On 4/26/22 19:05, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
> > I remember about 30 years ago, a registration card for a Microsoft
> > product had specific forms that they wanted for certain letters, for the
> > sake of a slightly inadequate handwriting recognition program.  Among
> > those was "ticked letter O".  A round 'O", with an extra mark on the
> > upper right. Like a slashed zero, with the slash going from upper right,
> > but stopping before the center of the character.  Or like an inverted 'Q'
> > At the time, I thought that that surely would increase confusion between
> > zero, letter 'O' and letter 'Q'.
> 
> All of that could have been avoided had we all adopted OCR-A
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A)

About 40 years ago I was with a group doing OCR. I still laugh at the pretentious
name of the paper the Engineer had written. (Dendritic analysis) I kept
thinking of teeth. (Pair of PDP-11/23 + single line 1024 bit CCD reader for the curious.)

OCR-B is a little kinder on the eyes you must admit. Courier font resulted
in so much bad OCR...

> 
> CDC actually adopted OCR-A as their official internal font.  My office
> typewriter (Olivetti) had such a font.   I hated it.
> 

Yes it is a horrible font!

> Finally, I managed to snag an IBM Model D Executive when one of the
> departments shuffled off to Minnesota.  ("Appropriating" equipment when
> departments moved or projects shut down was a favorite hobby.  All such
> equipment never left the facility, so I wasn't really doing anything
> wrong, but confusing the bean counters).   I had the best-looking office
> memos bar none.
> 
> OCR-B was a bit less offensive, but the difference between capital oh
> and zero was less apparent.

Yes. Now try Courier ;)

> 
> --Chuck
> 

-- Diane
-- 
db at FreeBSD.org db at db.net http://www.db.net/~db