In 1968, American Type Founders produced OCR-A, one of the first optical character recognition typefaces to meet the criteria set by the U.S. Bureau of Standards.

[3] As metal type gave way to computer-based typesetting, Tor Lillqvist used Metafont to describe the OCR-A font.[when?]

[6] To make the free version of the font more accessible to users of Microsoft Windows, John Sauter converted the Metafont definitions to TrueType using potrace and FontForge in 2004.

Luc Devroye corrected the vertical positioning in John Sauter's implementation, and fixed the name of lower case z.

In 2011 he released a new version created by rewriting the Metafont definitions to work with METATYPE1, generating outlines directly without an intermediate tracing step.

As a joke, Tobias Frere-Jones in 1995 created Estupido-Espezial, a redesign with swashes and a long s. It was used in a "technology"-themed section of Rolling Stone.

[13][14] Maxitype designed the OCR-X typeface—based on the OCR-A typeface with OpenType features, alien/technology-themed dingbats and available in six weights (Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Black).

Some lock box companies still insist that the account number and amount owed on a bill return form be printed in OCR-A.

In addition to the digits and unaccented letters, many of the characters of OCR-A have obvious code points in ASCII.