CMC-7
The European magnetic font for reading cheques, its characters built from seven vertical bars.
Developed in the late 1950s by France's Groupe Bull, it became the MICR standard for cheques across Europe and much of South America, while the United States picked E-13B. Each digit and six control symbols are encoded as seven vertical bars with varying gaps; the sorting machine reads the pattern of wide and narrow spaces once the ink has been magnetised. Its edge over E-13B is that the characters can also be read optically (OCR) without magnetism. As the paper cheque fades in the wake of digital payments, CMC-7 survives mainly where paper drafts still circulate.