Proportional-Width fonts that are easy on the eyes AND yield good OCR.

Question

I'd like recommendations on proportional-width fonts that are attractive and easy to read, but which are also easy to process with OCR. I'd love to push my OCR results from acceptable to excellent without having to throw every decent, proportional-width font out the door.

Fonts I've ruled out include OCR-A (monospaced and horrid), OCR-B (Pretty good, but monospaced) and any MICR based font. I'm not a monster at google, but have spent the last hour looking for advice - that's how I ended up here. ;-) If you've got ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Θịзηη

Answer 1

This is going to depend on your OCR software, but you should try a 'monoline' font, one where there's little or no variation between thick and thin.

The most readable I can think of offhand is ITC American Typewriter.

What happens with plain Helvetica?

The biggest problem I've found with OCR is when letters that are tightly spaced are erroneously combined. Can you set your letterspacing to a little wider than normal?

Answer 2

If you control the OCR side of the equation, you should be able to hint to the OCR engine the specific font which you are using which will dramatically improve the recognition accuracy of the engine.

This would enable you to select a font based on the desired visual appearance without giving up OCR accuracy