What is the ideal font for OCR?

Question

Does anybody have any experience with different fonts for OCR? I am generating an ID then trying to scan it with tesseract. At the moment I am just T&E'n different fonts, but this seems pretty inefficient. I've tried the OCR* family of fonts, and various others such as Arial and Georgia. The tesseract tends to get confused with the OCR* fonts.

Is there any font specifically designed for tesseract, or any system font which works well with it?

Answer 1

I'd probably use the same font that banks use for the routing numbers at the bottom of checks:

http://morovia.com/font/micr.asp

It was specifically designed to be unambiguously machine-readable.

Answer 2

Okay, a search on google comes up with this, a specific OCR font: OCR Font

Looks like it's a standard adopted in 1973.

Answer 3

I had always success by simply using times new roman..

Answer 4

I find that Calibri works the best for me. We use OCR software daily in an automated system and after testing dozens of fonts (including some OCR specific ones) that Calibri is consistently the best.

Good luck.