Machine-readable passport

[1] Machine-readable passports are standardized by the ICAO Document 9303 (endorsed by the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission as ISO/IEC 7501-1) and have a special machine-readable zone (MRZ), which is usually at the bottom of the identity page at the beginning of a passport.

Computers with a camera and suitable software can directly read the information on machine-readable passports.

In the name field, spaces, hyphens and other punctuation are represented by <, except apostrophes, which are skipped.

The data of the machine-readable zone in a TD1 size card consists of three rows of 30 characters each.

Yet some official travel documents are in the booklet format with a TD3 identity page.

This is due to a combination of the official Spanish translation of 9303 using "nacionalidad" rather than "ciudadania" to reflect the English original of citizenship - notable in part 3 section 7.1 which specifically addresses this potential error.

In October 2023, the high level technical team of TAG/TRIPS4 addressed the Uruguay case and it is proposed the translation is adjusted and the update is communicated to Uruguayan authorities.

Due to technical limits, characters inside the Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) need to be restricted to the 10 Arabic numerals, the 26 capital Latin letters A through Z, and the filler character <.

Apostrophes and similar punctuation marks have to be omitted, but hyphens and spaces should be replaced by an opening angle bracket.

Section 6 of the 9303 part 3 document specifies transliteration of letters outside the A–Z range.

It recommends that diacritical marks on Latin letters A-Z are simply omitted (ç → C, ď → D, ê → E, ñ → N etc.

ð, ñ and ü occur in Iceland and Spain, but they write them as D, N and U. Austrian passports may (but do not always) contain a trilingual (in German, English, and French) explanation of the German umlauts and ß. Russian visas (and Russian internal passports since 2011) have a different transliteration of Cyrillic into the machine-readable zone.