Machine readability — OCR / VLM

Character-recognition accuracy of rendered Buena Mono at small sizes · ← all reports

Generated against Buena Mono v1.235 · last updated 2026-09-25

The modern OCR-B question (Frutiger 1967): how reliably do machines read this typeface? Each test line is rendered at small pixel sizes and recognized with Tesseract (LSTM, --psm 7) and a vision-language model; scores are character-level similarity to ground truth.

  1. O0o 1lI| 5S 8B rn m cl d 2Z 9gq
  2. if (x1 != y0) { return b || l1; }
  3. const O0 = 'I1l|'; let S5 = "B8";
  4. printf("%d", 0xDEADBEEF ^ 0b1010);
  5. wget https://example.com/~user/v1.221
InstanceSizeL1L2L3L4L5Mean (Tesseract)Mean (VLM)
Thin9px73%79%82%88%95%83%100%
Thin12px75%91%84%88%99%87%—
Thin16px82%86%88%88%100%89%—
Thin24px89%80%88%91%100%90%—
Regular9px70%86%82%84%94%83%100%
Regular12px72%89%91%88%97%88%100%
Regular16px89%86%91%88%97%90%—
Regular24px89%82%94%90%97%90%—
ExtraBold9px80%81%85%71%92%82%100%
ExtraBold12px79%74%79%85%96%83%—
ExtraBold16px89%83%93%81%97%89%—
ExtraBold24px90%73%94%79%97%87%—
Italic9px74%80%79%90%97%84%—
Italic12px75%88%85%94%100%88%—
Italic16px82%86%91%91%100%90%—
Italic24px83%86%91%81%100%88%—

Sample stimuli

Thin 9px
Thin 24px
Regular 9px
Regular 24px
ExtraBold 9px
ExtraBold 24px
Italic 9px
Italic 24px

VLM column appears when machine-readability-vlm.json transcriptions are present (model: Claude, transcribing the rendered images).