| Category | Display |
|---|---|
| Designer(s) | Leo Maggs |
| Foundry | Hazel Sun Group |
| Date released | 1960s |
 | |
| Sample | |
Westminster (not to be confused with Westminster Old Style) is a printing and display typeface inspired by the font used for the MICR numbers printed on cheques [1] and designed by Leo Maggs. [2]
In the 1960s, Leo Maggs was working at the Hazell Sun Group's design studio in Covent Garden, London. At that time, he was commanded to create a futuristic style title for an article of About the House (the magazine of The Friends of Covent Garden Opera House). Maggs based the letters of that title on the MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) system, E-13B, used on bank cheques. He then continued to design the rest of the letters of the alphabet in his spare time, basing their proportions on that of the Gill Sans typeface. [3]
The MICR E-13B font was designed for automated reading by a very simple magnetic reader in the early days of automatic character recognition. The weight of strokes in the characters can be recognised as "light" or "heavy" by a simple circuit and these patterns then map directly to the bit patterns of a computer character set. This made the characters practical to read before 'smart' OCR, but limited the length of the character set. E-13B has only 14 characters: the numeric digits and a few control codes. None of the alphanumeric 'computer' typefaces like Westminster could be read magnetically.
The work was presented to Letraset, who declined to buy it, but soon after released their own rival typeface, Data 70. Other contemporary typefaces based on E-13B include Moore Computer (recognisable by its dots underneath the letters M and N), Gemini, Orbit-B, and Countdown. Later, Typodermic released another derivative, Minicomputer, and Pixel Sagas would release another derivative with Twobit.
Robert Norton, founder of the Photoscript Ltd photo-typesetting company, decided to produce Westminster. [3] The font was named by Norton and, according to Microsoft, received its name from Westminster Bank Limited (now NatWest) in the United Kingdom because it helped fund the font's production. [1] The font was included with Microsoft software after Microsoft hired Norton.
Since its design, the typeface has been strongly associated with computers, especially in the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s. The font is used frequently to indicate computer involvement in television series, films, books, and comics.
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacing, and spaces between pairs of letters. The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.
Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene photo or from subtitle text superimposed on an image.
A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spacings have different widths.
A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
Magnetic ink character recognition code, known in short as MICR code, is a character recognition technology used mainly by the banking industry to streamline the processing and clearance of cheques and other documents. MICR encoding, called the MICR line, is at the bottom of cheques and other vouchers and typically includes the document-type indicator, bank code, bank account number, cheque number, cheque amount, and a control indicator. The format for the bank code and bank account number is country-specific.
ERMA was a computer technology that automated bank bookkeeping and check processing. Developed at the nonprofit research institution SRI International under contract from Bank of America, the project began in 1950 and was publicly revealed in September 1955.
Security printing is the field of the printing industry that deals with the printing of items such as banknotes, cheques, passports, tamper-evident labels, security tapes, product authentication, stock certificates, postage stamps and identity cards. The main goal of security printing is to prevent forgery, tampering, or counterfeiting. More recently many of the techniques used to protect these high-value documents have become more available to commercial printers, whether they are using the more traditional offset and flexographic presses or the newer digital platforms. Businesses are protecting their lesser-value documents such as transcripts, coupons and prescription pads by incorporating some of the features listed below to ensure that they cannot be forged or that alteration of the data cannot occur undetected.
Microprinting is the production of recognizable patterns or characters in a printed medium at a scale that typically requires magnification to read with the naked eye. To the unaided eye, the text may appear as a solid line. Attempts to reproduce by methods of photocopy, image scanning, or pantograph typically translate as a dotted or solid line, unless the reproduction method can identify and recreate patterns to such scale. Microprint is predominantly used as an anti-counterfeiting technique, due to its inability to be easily reproduced by widespread digital methods.
The dotted or slashed zero 0̷ is a representation of the Arabic digit "0" (zero) with a slash or a dot through it. This variant zero glyph is often used to distinguish the digit "zero" ("0") from the Latin script letter "O" anywhere that the distinction needs emphasis, particularly in encoding systems, scientific and engineering applications, computer programming, and telecommunications. It thus helps to differentiate characters that would otherwise be homoglyphs. It was commonly used during the punch card era, when programs were typically written out by hand, to avoid ambiguity when the character was later typed on a card punch.
Georgia is a serif typeface designed in 1993 by Matthew Carter and hinted by Tom Rickner for Microsoft. It was intended as a serif typeface that would appear elegant but legible when printed small or on low-resolution screens. The typeface is inspired by Scotch Roman designs of the 19th century and was based on designs for a print typeface on which Carter was working when contacted by Microsoft; this would be released under the name Miller the following year. The typeface's name referred to a tabloid headline, "Alien heads found in Georgia."
IBM manufactured and sold document processing equipment such as proof machines, inscribers and document reader/sorters for financial institutions from 1934 to 2005.
Century Gothic is a digital sans-serif typeface in the geometric style, released by Monotype Imaging in 1990. It is a redrawn version of Monotype's own Twentieth Century, a copy of Bauer's Futura, to match the widths of ITC Avant Garde Gothic. It is an exclusively digital typeface that has never been manufactured as metal type.
OCR-A is a font issued in 1966 and first implemented in 1968. A special font was needed in the early days of computer optical character recognition, when there was a need for a font that could be recognized not only by the computers of that day, but also by humans. OCR-A uses simple, thick strokes to form recognizable characters. The font is monospaced (fixed-width), with the printer required to place glyphs 0.254 cm apart, and the reader required to accept any spacing between 0.2286 cm and 0.4572 cm.
Forms processing is a process by which one can capture information entered into data fields and convert it into an electronic format. This can be done manually or automatically, but the general process is that hard copy data is filled out by humans and then "captured" from their respective fields and entered into a database or other electronic format.
OCR-B is a monospace font developed in 1968 by Adrian Frutiger for Monotype by following the European Computer Manufacturer's Association standard. Its function was to facilitate the optical character recognition operations by specific electronic devices, originally for financial and bank-oriented uses. It was accepted as the world standard in 1973. It follows the ISO 1073-2:1976 (E) standard, refined in 1979. It includes all ASCII symbols, and other symbols needed in the bank environment. It is widely used for the human readable digits in UPC/EAN barcodes. It is also used for machine-readable passports. It shares that purpose with OCR-A, but it is easier for the human eye and brain to read and it has a less technical look than OCR-A.
Cheque Truncation System (CTS) or Image-based Clearing System (ICS), in India, is a project of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), commenced in 2010, for faster clearing of cheques. CTS is based on a cheque truncation or online image-based cheque clearing system where cheque images and magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) data are captured at the collecting bank branch and transmitted electronically.
Patrick J. Hanratty was an American computer scientist and businessperson, known as the "Father of CAD/CAM"—computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing. Up to 2013, he was president and CEO of Manufacturing and Consulting Services (MCS) of Scottsdale, Arizona, a company he founded. According to the University of California in 2012, industry analysts think that "70 percent of all 3-D mechanical CAD/CAM systems available today trace their roots back to Hanratty’s original code".
Optical Character Recognition is a Unicode block containing signal characters for OCR and MICR standards.
The ISO 2033:1983 standard defines character sets for use with Optical Character Recognition or Magnetic Ink Character Recognition systems. The Japanese standard JIS X 9010:1984 is closely related.
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