IC OCR-A

The baseline

OCR-A was specified by ANSI in 1977 so that cheap scanners could read it and humans could tolerate it. The outlines here descend from John Sauter's public-domain OCR-A 1.0, preserved glyph for glyph. Every one of the original 117 glyphs is still there, unchanged at the Archetype setting.

The axes

Width adds optically compensated condensed and expanded masters around the untouched original. Weight runs 200 to 800 at every width, pushing stroke outward and, only where counters can take it, inward. Spacing is the advance width in per-mille: 600 is a modern cell with symmetric sidebearings, 715 is the upstream cell, and the original 29-unit leftward lean is gone at every value.

Fixed properly

Upstream declared its ascender and descender as zero, so every renderer invented its own line height. IC OCR-A states a 1.2 em line explicitly and centres the ink in it. Box drawing and block elements are included so it holds up in a terminal.

What you get

• IC OCR-A variable font, TTF and WOFF2, all three axes
• Static Regular and Bold, TTF and WOFF2
• Archetype: the upstream-exact cut at spacing 715
• 537 glyphs, 534 codepoints, Latin plus box drawing
• Source of the licence you are buying, in plain English

Not certified for optical character recognition. Don't put it on a cheque.

You may

• Install and use the fonts on machines you own or control
• Set anything with them, commercial or not, logos included
• Embed them in sites, apps, documents, video and games, as part of the product
• Modify, subset and convert them for your own use
• Keep using any version you licensed, forever

You may not

• Redistribute, resell or give away the font files on their own
• Publish them anywhere they can be downloaded as fonts
• Present them as your own typeface
• Strip the licence or vendor information from the files

Want something the licence doesn't cover? Ask. The answer is usually yes.