Otto,
I am looking at ISO 1073/II-1976:
The two erase characters are the only members of set #5, reference numbers
are 120 and 121. The "Remarks" column is empty. 6.4 says : Application
advise is given in the column "Remarks", where it is indicated, inter alia,
which characters are included for general purpose use only and should not be
used for OCR purposes. (I guess, an empty column means that the character
can be used for OCR).
I have not found any more information in ISO 1073/II:1976. Sorry
Arnold
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Otto Stolz [mailto:Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de]
> Sent: Friday, August 16, 2002 10:30 AM
> To: Winkler, Arnold F
> Cc: Eric Muller; unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: Re: OCR characters
>
>
> Eric Muller had written:
>
> > In our OCR fonts, we have two glyphs named "erase" [...]
>
> > and "grouperase" [...] I suspect those are mandated by these
> > standards. On the other hand, and I can't find traces of those in
> > Unicode,
>
>
> Arnold F. Winkler wrote:
> > I believe, Eric is talking about the characters on the
> attached page 8 of
> > the OCR standard.
>
> I don't have ISO 1073 at hand, only the German
> - DIN 66 008 (Jan 1978), which is essentially identical with ISO
> 1073/I-1976,
> and
> - DIN 66 009 (Sept. 1977), which is based on, but not identical with,
> ISO 1073/II-1976.
>
> DIN 66 008 contains the figure reported by Arnold Winkler.
> This standard
> does not specify the intended usage of these characters --
> not beyond their
> expressive names.
>
> DIN 66 009 says about the equivalent OCR-B characters (my
> translation):
> > In case of a typo, a keyboard-driven device will print the
> Character
> Erase
> > on top of an erroneous character. This will cause the OCR
> reading device
> > to ignore this position.
> > The Group Erase may be either drawn by hand, or printed as
> discussed in
> > the previous paragraph. It will cause the OCR reading
> device to ignore
> > this position.
>
> So, these characters would never be read by an OCR device.
> They would be
> printed only in response to a function key (such as Erase
> Backwards), but
> never sent (encoded as characters) to a device. This means,
> that they will
> not normally be encoded, hence there will probably no need to
> assgin Uni-
> codes to them.
>
> The only exception could be a text discussing these characters, and
> their usage. I think, this sort of text would use figures rather than
> characters, to show the effect of overprinting in several variants.
> (The Erase, and the erased, character's positions may
> slightly differ.)
>
> So I guess, these characters are deliberately left off Unicode.
>
> Best wishes,
> Otto Stolz
>
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