8 character encoding, 1 unicode code pages, 2 default code pages – Konica Minolta Darwin VDP Software User Manual
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T EC - I T B a r c o d e So f t w a re R e f e re n c e
8 Character Encoding
8.1 UNICODE Code Pages
Due to internationalization and localization, strings are often encoded in the UNICODE character
set, because it allows to represent characters from many different languages and scripts. However,
barcode symbologies are usually able to process only a relatively small set of characters. Whereas
most of them are only capable of encoding a fix character set with a fix character encoding
– these
symbologies are not affected by the encoding topic, some others (particularly 2D symbologies) are
able to switch between several code pages.
Because even these barcodes types cannot display all character sets at the same time (unlike
UNICODE),
TBarCode
offers the possibility to let the user decide how the input data should be
interpreted (see the properties
EncodingMode
and
CodePage
).
8.2 Default Code Pages
Different barcode symbolgies use different default character encodings (=code pages).
Symbology
Default Encoding / Default Code Page
PDF417
MicroPDF417
ASCII Extended (Code Page 437)
QR-Code
Shift-JIS (Code Page 932)
Aztec Code
CODABLOCK-F
DataMatrix
MaxiCode
ANSI / Windows-1251 (Code Page 1252)
TBarCode V9: Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1)
Table 28: Default Code Pages
TBarCode Inform
always uses UTF-8 as default code page.
8.3 Code Page Switching
If a code page unlike the default code page shall be used, there must also be a way to tell the
barcode reader how the data should be interpreted. That means that you have to tell the reader,
which encoding, which code page has been used for encoding. This is usually done with ECI codes
(Extended Character Interpretation) which have to be added to the barcode data (see also section
4.6
Escape Sequences (Encoding Binary Data)).
►
Be aware that not all readers are able to handle ECI codes and decode the barcode data in
a correct manner. Many of the scanners just ignore the ECIs; others pass the them un-
translated to the addressee and let it do the work.