CMC-7

The CMC-7 is an alternative MICR font that has been adopted in various countries around the world. The usage of the CMC-7 control characters roughly parallel the usage of the E-13B control characters. There are, however, significant differences.

The CMC-7 consist of 10 numeric characters (0-9), five special symbols, and twenty six alphabetic characters (A-Z).

The five special symbols include:

S-1 (Internal)
S-2 (Amount)
S-3 (Terminator)
S-4 (not used)
S-5 (Routing)

The S-1 symbol serves a purpose similar to the On-Us symbol in that it identifies the start of the bank's internal information (account number, etc.). However, while the CMC-7 field structure has a similar E-13B auxiliary On-Us field, the S-1 symbol does not have any role in that field.

The S-2 symbol identifies the start of the amount field. Unlike the USA E-13B structure, this symbol is not used to terminate the amount field. The CMC-7 amount field terminates when the appropriate number of digits (minimum 10, maximum 12, followed by a blank) have been detected.

The S-3 symbol is used as the terminator for the bank routing information and appears a second time (following a minimum of four digits, maximum of seven digits) as the terminator of the check number field.

The S-5 symbol is the analog to the transit symbol of the USA E-13B structure. However, as with the Australian usage of E-13B, the S-5 symbol is not used to terminate the bank routing identification.

Although the structure of the S-4 symbol is defined, it does not serve any role in the structure of the MICR line.

Character design

Additional differences from the E-13B font are indicated in the CMC-7's character height and width. The character height for all of the numeric characters is 2.85-mm (or .112-inch), and special symbols is 2.70-mm (or .106-inch). Unlike the E-13B font, the CMC-7 characters all have the same width. Each CMC-7 character format consist of seven vertical strokes separated by six spaces of either 0.3- or 0.5-mm (referred to as short and long intervals). Each character contains two long intervals and four short intervals. Different permutations of the long and short intervals identify each character.

This is important enough to repeat:
It is important to remember that the optical specifications for MICR characters are for the printed characters, not the bitmap dimensions of the electronic MICR font. Consequently each MICR laser printer should use a custom MICR font that has been tailored to the magnifications and imaging characteristics of that specific printer. There are no universal electronic MICR font sets that will optimally work in all MICR laser printers.