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What is MICR

There are two types of MICR fonts

E-13B and CMC7

The CMC7 font, invented in France in 1957, is widely used in major European countries, including France and Italy. It comprises 15 characters, 10 numeric characters plus 5 control characters:

​Magnetic ink character recognition, or MICR, is a character recognition technology used primarily by the banking industry to facilitate the processing and clearance of cheques and other documents. The magnetic MICR encoding, called the MICR line, is located at the bottom of a cheque or other voucher and typically includes the document type indicator bank code, bank account number cheque number and the amount, plus some control indicator. The technology allows MICR readers to scan and read the information directly into a data collection device. Unlike barcodes or similar technologies, humans can easily read MICR characters.

The E-13B font is the standard in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and other countries. Besides decimal digits it also contains 4 delimiting control symbols:

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