On 4/26/22 19:05, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > I remember about 30 years ago, a registration card for a Microsoft > product had specific forms that they wanted for certain letters, for the > sake of a slightly inadequate handwriting recognition program. Among > those was "ticked letter O". A round 'O", with an extra mark on the > upper right. Like a slashed zero, with the slash going from upper right, > but stopping before the center of the character. Or like an inverted 'Q' > At the time, I thought that that surely would increase confusion between > zero, letter 'O' and letter 'Q'.
All of that could have been avoided had we all adopted OCR-A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A) CDC actually adopted OCR-A as their official internal font. My office typewriter (Olivetti) had such a font. I hated it. Finally, I managed to snag an IBM Model D Executive when one of the departments shuffled off to Minnesota. ("Appropriating" equipment when departments moved or projects shut down was a favorite hobby. All such equipment never left the facility, so I wasn't really doing anything wrong, but confusing the bean counters). I had the best-looking office memos bar none. OCR-B was a bit less offensive, but the difference between capital oh and zero was less apparent. --Chuck
