FONT RECOGNITION.

The need to design multifont print-readers is becoming critical as the volume of typewritten material received by various government agencies and the need to encode it for use by computers grow. The present study assumes the possibility of designing excellent single-font print-readers and studies the question of combining several of them to form one multifont print-reader. In this research, human font recognition is studied, and unaided font recognition is looked into. Several cooperative methods, in which the input document must be specially marked to facilitate font recognition, are studied, and one is studied extensively and simulated on the GE-635 computer. The latter method required the input document to display six characters--g, y, 1, 3, 4, 5--by inspection of which positive identification can be made for all of the 21 fonts studied. Author