Machine readable area

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A machine readable area ( engl. Machine Readable zone , abbreviated to MAR ) is an ID card or the one visible part of the travel document , which has been specifically designed for this by optical character recognition to be read.

Examples of machine-readable zones in accordance with ICAO specification 9303 for ID documents of various sizes

This reading zone is usually located in the lower area of ​​an identification document (for example the laminated side of a passport card ). The font OCR-B is used for the lettering . This font is disproportionate , which means that every character has the same pitch . The symbol ' < ' is used instead of spaces so that each position in the reading area is occupied by a character.

The content of machine-readable areas is regulated by national or international standards. The standard ICAO document 9303 (specification for machine-readable travel documents) describes three formats:

  • a three-line area with 30 characters per line for other identification documents in the small ID-1 / td-1 format (credit card format) on the back of the card,
  • a two-line area with 36 characters per line for identification documents in medium format ID-2 / td-2 on the front of the card,
  • a two-line area with 44 characters per line for passports in the large format ID-3 / td-3 (or MRP machine readable passport ) on the front of the card.

The current German ID card has a machine-readable area in the ID-1 / td-1 format. The machine-readable area of ​​the older identity cards that were applied for between April 1987 and October 2010 has the format ID-2 / td-2.

Umlauts , diacritics , " ß " and other special characters (such. As æ , œ , š , ž ) the names in the MRZ either circumscribed (eg., M ü ller → M UE LLER , Gro ß → GRO SS ) or replaced by normal letters (e.g. D é sir é e → D E SIR E E ). This means that the name is spelled in two ways in the document, which can cause confusion, especially abroad. The German naming rights (no. 38 NamÄndVwV) also recognizes special characters in the last name as the reason for an official name change (even a mere change of notation, z. B. of M Ü NETELLER to M UE NETELLER or WEI ß to WEI SS applies as such). On October 1, 1980 introduced the Federal Administrative Court again found that the technically caused erroneous reproduction of special characters on electronic systems can be an important reason for the change of surname (the plaintiff spelling wanted his name from G Ö TZ in G OE TZ change , but it initially failed at the registry office).

Austrian identification documents can contain a trilingual explanation (in German, English and French) of the German special characters, for example "'ß' corresponds to / is equal to / correspond à 'ss'".

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ International Civil Aviation Organization (Ed.): Machine Readable Travel Documents . Doc 9303. 7th edition. Montréal, Quebec, Canada 2015, ISBN 978-92-9249-790-3 ( online version [accessed March 7, 2016]).
  2. ↑ a b c d ID-x denotes the format according to ISO 7810 and td-y the format according to ICAO document 9303
  3. ↑ File number: 7 C 21/78