What Font Is Used On: Receipts [2021]
The answer might surprise you. It’s probably not a font you have installed on your computer. Most thermal receipts use a font family called OCR-B .
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition . This is the technology that allows computers and scanners to "read" text from an image. In the 1960s, banks and businesses realized they needed a standard typeface that machines could read easily—even if the printing was smudged, low-resolution, or on cheap paper. what font is used on receipts
And you can barely read it.
Why? Because receipt printers are very simple machines. They move the paper through at a steady, predictable speed. Monospaced fonts ensure the timing doesn't get messed up, preventing letters from crashing into each other. Not every receipt uses OCR fonts. Thanks to modern Point of Sale (POS) systems (like Square, Clover, or Toast), businesses now have more flexibility. The answer might surprise you
We’ve all been there. You grab a receipt from a cashier, glance at the total, and shove it into the bottom of your bag. But a few days later, when you need to return that shirt or expense that lunch, you pull out the crinkled strip of paper. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition
That means every character—an 'i' and a 'w'—takes up the exact same amount of horizontal space.
If your receipt came from an old-school dot matrix printer (loud, slow, with holes on the sides of the paper), it likely uses . What is OCR (Optical Character Recognition)? Before we dive into the fonts themselves, let’s talk about the acronym OCR .
