We’ve all been there. You grab a receipt from a cashier, glance at the total, and shove it into the bottom of your bag. But a few days later, when you need to return that shirt or expense that lunch, you pull out the crinkled strip of paper.
If your receipt came from an old-school dot matrix printer (loud, slow, with holes on the sides of the paper), it likely uses . What is OCR (Optical Character Recognition)? Before we dive into the fonts themselves, let’s talk about the acronym OCR .
Have you ever stopped to wonder why receipts look the way they do? Or more specifically: what font is used on receipts
Why? Because receipt printers are very simple machines. They move the paper through at a steady, predictable speed. Monospaced fonts ensure the timing doesn't get messed up, preventing letters from crashing into each other. Not every receipt uses OCR fonts. Thanks to modern Point of Sale (POS) systems (like Square, Clover, or Toast), businesses now have more flexibility.
That means every character—an 'i' and a 'w'—takes up the exact same amount of horizontal space. We’ve all been there
And you can barely read it.
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition . This is the technology that allows computers and scanners to "read" text from an image. In the 1960s, banks and businesses realized they needed a standard typeface that machines could read easily—even if the printing was smudged, low-resolution, or on cheap paper. If your receipt came from an old-school dot
The answer might surprise you. It’s probably not a font you have installed on your computer. Most thermal receipts use a font family called OCR-B .