What Are Optical Characters?

Optical characters are characters specially designed to be identifiable by humans as well as by some type of OCR reader. The optical reader shines light on the characters and converts the reflections into electronic patterns for machine recognition. The reader can identify only if it familiar with the font standard used. Today, most machines are designed to read several OCR fonts, even when these fonts are mixed in a single document.

Optical characters are widely used in processing turnaround documents, such as the credit card slips used for customer transaction in stores and restaurants. They also speed processing of the monthly bills that are typically sent by credit-card, utility, and cable TV companies to their customers. Such documents are imprinted in certain places with optical characters that aid processing when consumers send them back with payment or "turn them around". Today, however, many OCR fonts look so much like normal text that it's hard for an ordinary person to tell what parts the digital systems can read. Sometimes in a case of restaurants bill it's easy to spot the optical characters .Optical fonts have the advantage of being readable by machine, computer and human all.