Special Font & OCR Machine Immune to Over-Printing and Over-Writing : Jacob Rabinow

Special Font & OCR Machine Immune to Over-Printing and Over-Writing
ca. 1972

One of Rabinow's pet peeves concerned the design of paper-processing machines. Rabinow did not like the fact that many of these machines were designed with much difficulty to accommodate non-standard sizes and configurations of paper material. On the contrary, he considered it more prudent and efficient to standardize the paper-products in question to accommodate the machine.

To that end, Rabinow designed a special font based on a 5 x 5 grid that could be applied to paper-products. This font could be read by an OCR machine even when it was covered by print or handwriting as sometimes happens to the numbers on checks or to zip codes on envelopes. The trick was to design characters so that additional ink would not change them into other characters.

Rabinow then built a simple machine to demonstrate the font. The machine uses a 5 x 5 matrix of photocells (top) which feed resistor correlation matrices. When a character is placed in the proper position over the photocells, the corresponding resistor matrix produces the smallest current and this is easily seen on the corresponding millimeter (front).