Glossary — Letter O

Optical Character Recognition. Characters designed for the purpose of optical recognition.

In Japan, before barcodes became widespread, many industries (books, household electrical appliances, sports equipment, toys, etc.) and some retailers had already adopted POS.
When POS was introduced via barcode, both the JAN symbol and OCR characters were shown together, to bridge OCR and barcode. This is called an OCR-affixed JAN symbol.

A character in an EAN symbol whose sum of black bar modules is odd (not even). (See flag).