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M.I.C.R.

MICR stands for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition.

Characters are printed using a special magnetic ink which contains iron oxide. As the document passes into the M.I.C.R. reader, the ink is magnetised, so that the shapes of the characters can be recognised electronically.

The characters have to be printed in a special font, the one used in Britain has only 14 possible characters :-

 

Advantages :

  • Documents are difficult to forge.
  • Documents can still be read after being written on, folded, spilt on etc...

Disadvantages :

  • M.I.C.R. readers and encoders are expensive.
  • The system can only accept a few characters.

 
Application:

The main use of MICR is to input data from bank cheques.
When you write a cheque, you fill in 5 things:

the date;
who you are paying;
the amount in words;
the amount in numbers;
your signature.

(click on picture)
The Cheque Number, the Branch Sort Code and the Account Number are printed in magnetic ink at the bottom. The Amount gets typed in later.

All the cheques received get fed into an MICR Reader and the data is automatically input to the bank's computer system. The advantages of this system is that it is fast and cuts out human error.

MICR reader.
Exercise : MICR
Some of the interactive tasks are only available on the CD version.
(Green indicates success)