This Unicode block includes those symbolic characters of the OCR-A character set that do not correspond to ASCII characters. OCR-A consists of carefully drawn uppercase A to Z, plus a few other specialty signs. OCR-B adds lowercase and a few more punctuation marks.

It also contains magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) symbols used in check processing. The MICR character set E-13B, used primarily in the USA and Canada, consists of the numbers 0-9 and a few other special character that you see printed at the bottom of most checks. Note that these are printed with a special magnetic ink, and so are read magnetically, rather than optically. The font is based on a grid of 7 by 11 squares, and filled to make them more distinct to the reader.

The MICR character set CMC-7, designed in France and used in Europe, also contains the letters A-Z. Each character is made up of seven vertical lines, each line either thick or thin. Each line has a length and position to make it resemble the letter in question.

Note that Unicode does not deal with display issues, and so does not re-encode the regular ASCII characters.

Both of these sets of symbols are specified in ISO 2033


Unicode's Optical Character Recognition code block reserves the 32 code points from U+2440 to U+245F, of which 11 are currently assigned.

Control Pictures <-- Optical Character Recognition --> Enclosed Alphanumerics

All the characters in this code block were added in Unicode 1.1

All the characters in this code block are in general category Symbol, Other So

All the characters in this code block are in bidirectional category Other Neutral ON

The columns below should be interpreted as :

  1. The Unicode code for the character
  2. The character in question
  3. The Unicode name for the character

If the characters below show up poorly, or not at all, see Unicode Support for possible solutions.

 

Optical Character Recognition

     OCR

U+2440   ⑀   OCR hook
U+2441   ⑁   OCR chair
U+2442   ⑂   OCR fork
U+2443   ⑃   OCR inverted fork
U+2444   ⑄   OCR belt buckle
U+2445   ⑅   OCR bow tie
ref U+22C8   ⋈   bowtie (Mathematical Operators)
U+2446   ⑆   OCR branch bank identification
aka transit
U+2447   ⑇   OCR amount of check
U+2448   ⑈   OCR dash
aka on us
U+2449   ⑉   OCR customer account number
aka dash
U+244A   ⑊   OCR double backslash

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