The 14 characters of the E-14B MICR font—the last four are for control purposes. This book cover from the 1980s was typical of the era – leaning on E-13B tropes to convey a technical aesthetic.

The standard currently includes nearly 150,000 unique characters, each with its own number and description. ... Unicode is comprehensive while fonts’ character sets are finite.

Google recently announced a font family, Noto, that aims to include all the world's written languages. But it may prove to be an even more ambitious effort than self-driving cars.

While fonts containing so many characters tend to be at least 40MB, Source Han Serif is less than 25MB, with downloads available with the set as a whole or in language subsets.

So IDEO decided to resolve the issue by making a font of fake numbers in the same vein as Lorem Ipsum. Numbers in a design mockup can be distracting for clients who feel an urge to correct them. IDEO ...