In the Visual Inspection Zone of a travel document the name is written in the script used in the issuing country plus in a Romanized version. The transformation rules are set by the issuer; e.g., Russia is now following the rules for English as opposed to French (which was the case some ten+ years ago). This Romanized version in the travel document is the one to be used in Latin script in any official context.
I’ve always considered the Machine Readable Zone to contain a code as opposed to text which it, however, resembles (with all the limitations of OCR-B). Sincerely, Erkki Lähettäjä: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Puolesta Philippe Verdy Lähetetty: 6. heinäkuuta 2013 0:44 Vastaanottaja: Richard Wordingham Kopio: Unicode Public Aihe: Re: writing in an alphabet with fewer letters: letter replacements The only relevant part is: [quote]Élément biométrique vérifiable par machine. Élément physique d’identification personnelle unique (par exemple motif de l’iris, empreinte digitale ou caractéristiques faciales), stocké sur un document de voyage dans une forme lisible et vérifiable par machine.[/quote] No more details about the data stored in the magnetic tape or in the RFID chip. The document only gives info about the printed text readable by OCR, plus a few other mechanical security systems for building them. There is also some small data perforated on some pages, no idea if it is secured or contains something else than a unique ID of the passport itself, the rest of the data being accessed by computer networks. 2013/7/5 Richard Wordingham <[email protected]> On Fri, 5 Jul 2013 21:36:24 +0200 Philippe Verdy <[email protected]> wrote: > I have absolutely no information about what is encoded in the machine > readable part of my passport, See http://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p1_v1_cons_fr.pdf , especially Appendice 8 (p IV-50). The English version is available as http://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303_p1_v1_cons_en.pdf , especially Appendix 8 (p IV-47). Richard.
