OCR-B

When optical character recognition was new, the readers needed typefaces whose characters were clearly distinct. The American OCR-A (1968) sacrificed legibility for the machine's sake and looks almost robotic. The typographer Adrian Frutiger was commissioned to do the opposite: a font a machine can handle but that still reads like normal text. The result was OCR-B, standardised as ISO 1073-2.

It sits in the machine-readable zone at the foot of passports and ID cards, in the ISBN line on books and on European payment slips. Modern OCR now reads almost any typeface, but OCR-B lives on precisely where a misread costs money or lets the wrong person through.