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Polonization of the OCR-B (Optical Character Recognition – font B) typeface for automatic reading in optical readers, adopted by the ECMA (European Computer Manufactures Association). OCR-B was designed in Paris by Adrian Frutiger. The glyphs of Polish letters were drawn at the Center of Printing Scripts and tested at the Institute of Organization and Management of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS) during the construction of recognition devices. Leon Urbański and Helena Nowak-Mroczek worked on the typeface during the initial stage. The final version, approved by the Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Adrian Frutiger, was made by Elżbieta Krużyńska. OCR-B was the working letter of the first CTM-02 and CTM-03 typewritten text readers built by PAS cyberneticists. The devices worked from 1975 in the Dom Słowa (The House of Word) printing house in Warsaw, where they recognized typescripts made on IBM Composer machines and encoded the Linotron 505TC control tape - the third generation phototypesetter. The Polish writing heads for machines were produced at the Paris branch of IBM. In the 1970s, Poland joined only a few countries using automatic text reading, being the only country covered by the embargo on modern electronic technologies established in the West.



Scripts