Optical character readers for document handling

After an introductory survey and comparison of four different stylized type faces for use on banking and other documents and a discussion of such factors as number of characters, reading speed, printing specifications, reliability, ocular legibility,expense and protection aganist forgery, the author describes in greater detail the operating principles of the Standard Electronic Lorenz character reading system. The use of infra-red light gives good resistance to background interference and the choice of typeface and manner of coding permit greater skew and misalingment tolerances than in other methods. A report on the results of an independent test of several machines of different makes shows the Standard system to produce significantly fewer errors although the tests were conducted in all cases with clean documents not handled by the public and the results could be different under actual service conditions.