# Optical Character Recognition (Unicode block)

Optical Character Recognition is a Unicode block containing signal characters for OCR and MICR standards.

## Block

Optical Character Recognition Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF) :
| | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | A |
| U+244x | ⑀ | ⑁ | ⑂ | ⑃ | ⑄ | ⑅ | ⑆ | ⑇ | ⑈ | ⑉ | ⑊ |
| U+245x | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 16.0 2.^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points |||||||||||||||||

## Subheadings

The Optical Character Recognition block has three informal subheadings (groupings) within its character collection: OCR-A, MICR, and OCR.

### OCR-A

The OCR-A subheading contains six characters taken from the OCR-A font described in the ISO 1073-1:1976 standard: U+2440 ⑀ OCR HOOK, U+2441 ⑁ OCR CHAIR, U+2442 ⑂ OCR FORK, U+2443 ⑃ OCR INVERTED FORK, U+2444 ⑄ OCR BELT BUCKLE, and U+2445 ⑅ OCR BOW TIE. The OCR bow tie is given the informative alias "unique asterisk".
The hook, chair and fork, in addition to a long vertical bar, are included in the most basic "numeric" implementation level of OCR-A, which includes digits but excludes letters and conventional punctuation. By contrast, the most basic implementation level of OCR-B instead includes the digits, plus sign, less-than sign, greater-than sign, long vertical bar and seven of the capital letters; as such, there are no characters specific to OCR-B in the Optical Character Recognition block.

### MICR

The MICR subheading contains four punctuation characters for bank cheque identifiers, taken from the magnetic ink character recognition E-13B font (codified in the ISO 1004:1995 standard): U+2446 ⑆ OCR BRANCH BANK IDENTIFICATION, U+2447 ⑇ OCR AMOUNT OF CHECK, U+2448 ⑈ OCR DASH, and U+2449 ⑉ OCR CUSTOMER ACCOUNT NUMBER.
The latter two characters are misnamed: their names were inadvertently switched when they were named in the 1993 (first) edition of ISO/IEC 10646, a mistake which had been present since Unicode 1.0.0. Although their formal names remain unchanged due to the Unicode stability policy, they both have corrected normative aliases: U+2448 ⑈ is MICR ON US SYMBOL, and U+2449 ⑉ is MICR DASH SYMBOL (the standard notes that "the Unicode character names include several misnomers").
These symbols had previously been encoded by the ISO-IR-98 encoding defined by ISO 2033:1983, in which they were simply named SYMBOL ONE through SYMBOL FOUR. All four characters have informative aliases in the Unicode charts: "transit", "amount", "on us", and "dash" respectively.

### OCR

The OCR subheading consists of a single character: U+244A ⑊ OCR DOUBLE BACKSLASH.

## History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Optical Character Recognition block:
| Version | Final code points | Count | L2 ID | WG2 ID | Document |
| 1.0.0 | U+2440..244A | 11 | | | (to be determined) |
| 1.0.0 | U+2440..244A | 11 | L2/10-416R | | Moore, Lisa (2010-11-09), "Consensus 125-C39", UTC #125 / L2 #222 Minutes, Create two formal aliases, U+2448 MICR ON US SYMBOL and U+2449 MICR DASH SYMBOL for Unicode 6.1. |
| 1.0.0 | U+2440..244A | 11 | | N4103 | "T.3. Optical Character Recognition", Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 58, 2012-01-03 |
| 1.0.0 | U+2440..244A | 11 | L2/22-065 | | Whistler, Ken (2022-04-13), "Opt Subject: Unicode 14.0 "Optical Character Recognition" code chart [Affects U+2447]", Editorial Committee Report and Recommendations for UTC #171Meeting |
| ↑ Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names ||||||