OCR-B is a monospace font developed in 1968 by Adrian Frutiger for Monotype by following the European Computer Manufacturer's Association standard.

Its function was to facilitate the optical character recognition operations by specific electronic devices, originally for financial and bank-oriented uses.

In June 1961, the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) started standardization activities related to Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

[6] The request was generalized to extend OCR-B with a number of Latin and Greek letters used in European languages.

[7]: 1 In June 1998, the European Committee for Standardization published a report for adding the Euro sign to OCR-B.

[5] The report proposed both a single-stroked and a double-stroked variant of the Euro sign, leaving the decision to further testing of OCR performance.

[5]: 4  Testing was difficult: the theoretical design methods used when the OCR-B glyphs were originally developed could no longer be reproduced, and the technological constraints of the 1960s were also not entirely relevant anymore in the OCR environments of the 1990s.

The TeX typesetting system has a public domain Constant Strokewidth OCR-B font in METAFONT definition form.