E-13B Font

This font is used for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) and is primarily used for cheque processing in the banking industry. Since special ink is used to print the MICR characters, they can be recognized by a MICR reader with high reliability, even if the characters are written over or obscured in any way. This font is also easily readable by humans.

The following countries are examples of where the MICR E-13B font is used:

  • United States

  • Canada

  • Puerto Rico

  • Panama

  • United Kingdom

This font is specifically supported by the RecoStar recognition engine.

This font contains the characters 0 through 9, and four special symbols. The following image shows the four symbols grouping the numerals (from left to right): transit, amount, on-us, and dash.


An image that shows an example of the E13B MICR font.
  • transit - delimits a bank branch routing transit number. RecoStar returns this symbol as a hex(3A) = ":" delimiter.

  • amount - delimits a transaction amount. RecoStar returns this symbol as a hex(3B) = ";" delimiter.

  • on-us - delimits a customer account number. RecoStar returns this symbol as a hex(3C) = "<" delimiter.

  • dash - delimits parts of numbers (routing numbers or account numbers). RecoStar returns this symbol as a hex(3D) = "=" delimiter.