"While the United Nations held a travel conference in 1963, no passport guidelines resulted from it. Passport standardization came about in 1980, under the auspices of the ICAO.
ICAO standards include those for machine-readable passports.
Such passports have an area where some of the information otherwise written in textual form is written as strings of alphanumeric characters, printed in a manner suitable for optical character recognition.
This enables border controllers and other law enforcement agents to process these passports more quickly, without having to input the information manually into a computer."
"While the United Nations held a travel conference in 1963, no passport guidelines resulted from it. Passport standardization came about in 1980, under the auspices of the ICAO.
ICAO standards include those for machine-readable passports.
Such passports have an area where some of the information otherwise written in textual form is written as strings of alphanumeric characters, printed in a manner suitable for optical character recognition.
This enables border controllers and other law enforcement agents to process these passports more quickly, without having to input the information manually into a computer."