OCR-B Series - History by Aoife Tobin

HISTORY

OCR-B

HISTORY OFTHE TYPEFACE

Signature

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION

ADRIAN FRUTIGER

WHY WAS OCR-B DESIGNED?

OCR TECHNOLOGY

MACHINE-READABLE TYPEFACES

WORLDWIDE STANDARDISATION

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HISTORY

INTRODUCTION The creation of type in the latter half of the 20th Century was considerably influenced by the Swiss type designer Adrian Frutiger. His typefaces are amongst the most successful of contemporary classics. His Univers typeface and the machine-readable font OCR-B, which was adopted as an ISO standard, are milestones, as is his type for the Paris airports, which set new standards for signage types and evolved into the Frutiger typeface. Together with the sans serif typefaces Avenir and Vectora, they were responsible for his reputation as ‘Mr. Sans Serif’. Altogether Adrian Frutiger has designed over 50 typefaces in various font styles, including Ondine, Méridien, Serifa, and Iridium. Also created in collaboration with colleagues were the corporate typefaces, including Shiseido, and more than 100 logos and wordmarks. This series will concentrate solely on the OCR-B typeface, designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1968. This book in particular details the history behind this typeface, covering topics such as why it was designed, what is OCR Technology, and the standardistaion of the font in 1973.

Adrian Frutiger

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Adrian Frutiger was born in 1928 at Unterseen near Interlaken, Switzerland. After an apprenticeship as a compositor, he continued his training in type and graphics at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule) from 1949 to 1951, being taught by two renowned professors, Alfred Willimann and Walter K채ch.

Frutiger went to Paris in 1952 and worked as typeface designer and artistic manager at Deberny & Peignot. His first typeface creations were Phoebus (1953), Ondine (1954) and Meridien (1955), and through the foundry’s connections with Photon/ Lumitype Frutiger created some of the earliest typefaces for photocomposition. He established his international position as a typeface designer with his Univers sans-serif font, produced for metal and film in 1957. Together with Bruno Pfäffli and André Gürtler, he founded his own studio in Arcueil near Paris in 1961. He was also Professor for ten years at the Ecole Estienne and eight years at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.

In addition to his typeface design, Frutiger has been a consultant to IBM and the Stempel typefoundry. He produced the typeface for Paris Charles de Gaulle airport during the early 1970s and Linotype subsequently released this in 1977 as Frutiger. He moved back to Switzerland in 1994 and continued to work on updated versions of his typefaces. He died in Bremgarten bei Bern on 10 September 2015. He has received several awards and honours: 1986, the Gutenberg Prize of the City of Mainz (Germany); 1987, Medal of the Type Directors Club of New York; 1993, Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Paris); 1993, Grand Prix National des Arts Graphiques (France).

Why was OCR-B designed?

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With the advent of optical character recognition (OCR) systems, a need arose for typefaces whose characters could be easily distinguished by machines developed to read text. Unfortunately, a face that sufficiently distinguished between ‘1’, ‘i’, and ‘l’’ for the machine tended to look crude, if not just plain ugly. OCR-A was such a typeface. OCR-B was subsequently designed as a standard typeface that would be adequately readable by both human and machine.

In 1961 thirteen computer and typewriter manufacturers founded the ‘European Computer Manufacturers Association’ – ECMA – based in Geneva. The main objective for its founding members was the creation of an international standard for optical character recognition to be used. But most of all they wanted to avoid the wider adoption of OCR-A in Europe. It was one of the first machine-readable typefaces that came from the United States. For the European OCR manufacturers it was a given that the shape of its capitals would never be accepted over here, and they were intent on coming up with a European answer, OCR-B, that would be aesthetic and pleasant to the human eye.

In 1963 Adrian Frutiger was approached by Robert Ranc, director of the École Estienne, and Gilbert Weill, an engineer from the R & D department at Compagnie des Machines Bull, asking me to develop OCR-B. In a first meeting they explained their goals: they wanted to suggest an international standard using a non-stylised form of the alphabet. The problem with this task was that all companies that were members of the ECMA had developed their own readers and each of those worked in a different way; some read the counter, others the contours and yet others the centerline.

OCR Technology WHAT IS OCR?

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As you read these words, your eyes and brain are carrying out optical character recognition without you even noticing. Your eyes are recognising the patterns of light and dark that make up the characters printed on the screen and your brain is using those to figure out what is trying to be said (sometimes by reading individual characters but mostly by scanning entire words and whole groups of words at once). Computers can do this too, but it’s really hard work for them. The first problem is that a computer has no eyes, so if you want it to read something like the page of an old book, you have to present it with an image of that page, generated with an optical scanner or a digital camera. The page you create this way is a graphic file and, as far as a computer’s concerned, there’s no difference between it and any other graphic: it’s a completely meaningless pattern of pixels. In other words, the computer has a picture of the page rather than the text itself—it can’t read the words on the page like we can. OCR is the process of turning a picture of text into text itself.

HOW DOES OCR WORK? Let’s suppose life was really simple and there was only one letter in the alphabet: A. Even then, you can probably see that OCR would be quite a tricky problem—because every single person writes the letter A in a slightly different way. Even with printed text, there’s an issue, because books and other documents are printed in many different typefaces (fonts) and the letter A can be printed in many subtly different forms. If everyone wrote the letter A exactly the same way, getting a computer to recognize it would be easy. You’d just compare your scanned image with a stored version of the letter A and, if the two matched, that would be that. So how do you get everyone to write the same way? Back in the 1960s, a special font called OCR-A was developed that could be used on things like bank checks and so on. Every letter was exactly the same width and the strokes were carefully designed so each letter could easily be distinguished from all the others. Check-printers were designed so they all used that font, and OCR equipment was designed to recognise it too. By standardising on one simple font, OCR became a relatively easy problem to solve.

Machine-Readable Typefaces

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Initially the shapes of OCR typefaces (optical character recognition) were solely determined by the reading technology of computers. They had to be simplified or stylised. The only criterion was that of correct recognition. The â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;first generationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of stylized machine-readable typefaces included two magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) fonts. MICR Code is a characterrecognition technology used mainly by the banking industry to ease the processing and clearance of cheques and other documents. The MICR encoding, called the MICR line, is at the bottom of cheques and other vouchers and typically includes the documenttype indicator, bank code, bank account number, cheque number, cheque amount, and a control indicator.

The technology allows MICR readers to scan and read the information directly into a data-collection device. Unlike barcodes and similar technologies, MICR characters can be read easily by humans. The numerals face E13B of the American Bankers Association was part of this ‘first generation’. It was based on a matrix of 7 by 10 cells. Another typeface for magnetic readers was CMC7 (Caractères Magnétiques Codés), developed in 1961 by the French Compagnie des Machines Bull. Its numerals and capitals were each constructed using seven strokes of constant weight whereas the counters varied.

In 1961 a committee of the USA Standards Institute (USASI) agreed on the creation of OCR-A as a national standard for machinereaders. This typeface with its still extremely stylized shape based on a matrix of 5 by 9 cells belonged to the ‘second generation’. OCR-A was preceded by fonts from different manufacturers, including Farrington, NCR (National Cash Register) and IBM. Initially it only contained numerals, capitals and a few special characters but was later extended to include lowercase letters as well. Together with OCR-B it was recommended by ISO in 1966. Adrian Frutiger’s typeface OCR-B belonged to the ‘third generation’ featuring a look that was more pleasing to the human eye.

Worldwide Standardisation

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Since the beginning of the 20th Century many countries have devised national standards – for electrical sockets or paper sizes, for example. Due to growing globalisation an increasing need emerged to make these national standards compatible with each other. This resulted in the foundation of the International Organisation for Standardisation – ISO in 1947.

It is this organisation to which ECMA submits its applications for the certification of worldwide standards. The increasing use of computers, which were being produced by a growing number of manufacturers to their own standards, created the need to standardise basic operating technologies for software applications. With the main objective of coordinating the different computer standards, three companies – Compagnie des Machines Bull, IBM World Trade Europe Corporation and International Computers and Tabulators Limited – initiated a meeting of all major European computer manufacturers that led to the foundation of the ECMA in 1961, a private standards organisation for the standardisation of information and communication systems.

One of ECMA’s projects dealt with automatic character recognition. Adrian Frutiger developed two versions of OCR-B: the first one featured constant stroke weight and round terminations. In the second, called ‘Letterpress’, the stroke weight was adapted according to optical criteria and the terminations were angular. Initially OCR-B was monospaced. Additionally the width of the glyphs varied, i e. it was a proportional typeface.

OCR-B, which was initially developed for typewriter setting, was swiftly adapted to other typesetting systems (for example Monotype in 1971) and is still used in contemporary computerised technologies. Frutiger was one of the first designers worldwide who – with regards to machine-readable typefaces – dealt with questions of aesthetics in combination with technology. This led to his giving numerous talks on the subject, the first of which took place in 1967 in Paris at the ATypI conference. After a first recommendation by the ISO committee in 1966, OCR-B was declared a worldwide standard in 1973.

HISTORY

OCR-B