Really free OCR A This font is the one that's supposed to be used for the human-readable numbers in the bar code labels on consumer products, including book ISBN labels. It's also quite similar, but not identical, to the font used for the embossed numerals on credit cards. A freely distributable version seems to be sorely needed. Until now, it's been very difficult to find the font in computer-usable format except by paying a high fee to a commercial font vendor. Even many serious commercial publishers have so much trouble getting it right that they just go ahead and use Helvetica instead, or even (shudder) Arial. Since the OCR A font is required by an international standard, it seems like it ought to be free. So here it is. The font in this package is not a "ripped", pirated, or shadily reverse engineered version; every effort has been made to ensure that it genuinely derives from free sources and all the creators involved have actually intended it for free public use. Converted by Matthew Skala from Metafont format to Postscript and TrueType formats, July 27, 2006, using mftrace 1.2.4 by Paul Vojta, which is available from http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen/mftrace/ and Autotrace 0.31.1 available from http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/ The mftrace output was edited slightly to add a "space" character, which seemed to be missing. The Metafont files (included) were coded by Richard B. Wales in 1988 and 1989, based on an earlier version by Tor Lillqvist, in turn based on ANSI Standard X3.17-1977, approved January 20, 1977 by the American National Standards Institute, Inc. PLEASE NOTE: The copyright notice by Richard Wales in ocra.mf forbids charging more than "a reasonable copying or communications charge" for this font. As far as I (Matthew Skala) am concerned, in this day and age Internet communication is so cheap that any fee at all is more than the reasonable cost of providing a download. If you post this font on a so-called "free fonts" Web site that charges any fee whatsoever, or one that purportedly provides the font for free but makes the visitor jump through hoops to actually get the free font, and also offers a more convenient download for a fee, then I will consider you to be in violation of the copyright and may take action against you. Free fonts are rare treasures, and OCR A in particular is extremely difficult to find in the non-commercial world despite being an international standard that ought to be free if anything is. It took a lot of effort - hours of work valued at far more than the cost of just paying one of those commercial vendors for the font - and my unique expertise in obsolete computer systems, which didn't come cheap either - to get a really free version that I could share with everyone at no charge. So let's keep it really free, eh? Matthew Skala mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/