What is the ideal font for OCR?

Question

Does anybody have any experience with different fonts for OCR? I am generating an ID then trying to scan it with tesseract. At the moment I am just T&E\'n different font

Answer 1

I've been doing extensive testing in this recently in an ECM called Laserfiche, which uses Nuance OmniPage, and I've found that monospace fonts perform poorly compared to dynamically spaced fonts. Those old OCR fonts don't perform as well as more 'normal' looking fonts. Especially for strings of numbers at smaller font sizes like point 12.

It's strange that someone else is having success with Calibri. It performed very poorly in my tests, routinely getting similar looking letters and numbers confused for each other. The best fonts (among those that come on a Windows computer with Office installed) were Consolas, Verdana, and Book Antiqua. All dynamic serif fonts where letters and numbers looked distinct. Consolas was the champion.