good fonts for ocr

[Jordan L Dressman]

I'm using arial 16pt font and it is mistaking an 8 for a B.  Is there better fonts I can use that work well with ocr.  I don't have ocr-a and ocr-b font options.  From the ones I have tried I have to increase the fonts quite a bit to get more accurate.  It would be great if there is a font that works well at 10 or 12 point font. 

Also anything else that would increase the accuracy and speed?  Would it be better to only use black on white and eleminate all color?

[Ray Smith]

Arial isn't the best choice. If you want to optimize accuracy and speed, courier is about the best choice, but if you don't want a fixed pitch font, choose times new roman, as it will suffer less on I/l than sans-serif fonts. Courier will be useful for speed, as it is fixed pitch. If you go with times though, it would be good to increase the inter-character spacing just a bit to stop adjacent characters touching.

Ray.

[Jordan L Dressman]

Thanks that is good info. 

 

Do you think that eliminating color would help?  Such as white background and black text. Right now it can be different backgrounds and text color.

[Ray Smith]

Eliminating color may help. The current adaptive thresholding is not as good as it could be, but as long as you avoid low contrast combinations like red/black or green/white it should be ok.

Ray.