1.  The OCR line

• Location: The best case is to have the OCR line located at the bottom right of the document with no printed information to its right.

• Clear Band (or no-noise zone): The area around the OCR line should be clear (all white – no printing) on the top and bottom for at least ¼ inch from the edge of the printing. Usually this means that the OCR line including the clear band will be at least 5/8^th of an inch high.

• OCR Font: A standard OCR font must be used to take advantage of the machine reading capability. The preferred fonts are OCR-A and OCR-B, printed at 10 characters per inch. Any other character spacing may cause lowered read rates. Other existing OCR fonts can be considered, but should be approved in advance before assuming that they can be read.

• Printer Selection: As we said above, laser printed documents will have the best success with OCR. The next best is usually an impact type printer, as long as the ribbon is kept fresh during the printing process. The worst results are obtained by band (line) printers.

• Print Registration: Another consideration is the registration of the printing. When the registration is good, it means that the document information is consistently printed in the same location on the document. If the registration is skewed too far in any direction, it will be outside the OCR head position or zone set up in the parameters.
  
  The clear band comes into play here with registration when working with a unit like the 7731. If a large clear band is provided, then registration can be less strict, and the OCR read zone can be made larger to accommodate the OCR scanline being in a different position. If the clear band is not as large an area, and the zone is constrained, print registration becomes critical.

• OCR Field Spacing: Providing a space in between fields can be helpful to the operator when performing field completion on a misread field. It is also useful for extraction to ensure that a document does not read information from one field into another (on some machines), as the space could be used to "delimit" the field and assist the extraction process in finding the proper start of a field which occurs to the left of a field which did not read properly.
  
  The Panini compresses all spaces out of its OCR data, so this technique cannot be used to extract discrete fields. On the 7731 however, this technique can be used to keep a misread field from affecting the other extracted fields.
  
  When creating a document with space delimited fields for the 7731, do not use more than one space in between the fields. One space will be accounted for by the OCR engine. More than one space will degrade the performance of the OCR read and slow the machine’s response time down.

• OCR Line Consistency: The location of the OCR line should be consistent between all stub definitions so that the operator is not required to change the position of the OCR read head between batches on machines that have a physical OCR reader (i.e. Panini).
  
  On machines that perform OCR from the image (like the 7731), it is important for performance reasons to locate all of the OCR zones in the same place. On the 7731, this includes the MICR line, as it is read as an E13B OCR line. If the zone for each stub is located in the same place as the zone for the check, then the 7731 can use the same grayscale image data for every OCR process. The grayscale data has the best read rate.
  
  If the OCR zone is located in a different position than the MICR line of the check, then the Flex software will attempt to create one zone that will incorporate both of the individual zones. The OCR zone used in the 7731 hardware has a maximum area of about 6 in². If both zones cannot be combined into a zone of this size or smaller, the software will create two zones instead. The tradeoff in doing this is that the second zone (used for MICR in Flex) must be taken from the bi-level (black and white) image that was lifted. This black and white image will provide a slightly lower read rate. The same goes for multiple stub OCR line definitions. They should be kept in the same zone for best results.