Barcode Forums by Morovia

[thedave(Legacy Member)]

Is there a way using any of the Morovia PDF417 related products to encode a non-English character set? Specifically, I'm trying to encode Arabic text into a barcode. I have the Unicode character code chart for Arabic, but am unclear whether or not I can encode using these codes. Does anyone have any information on encoding this type of text into a PDF417 barcode?

[glitch (legacy member)]

PDF417 standard has no idea about unicode. The standard defines a feature called Global Label Identification (GLI), which is supposed to sort out mixed language issues. However, it is still single-byte based and requires that the application(or the scanner) handles the translation issue.

If you have the control over both read/write, you might consider a straightforward solution - just treating unicode/arabic characters as binary. Your application handles the translation at both sides.

[thedave(Legacy Member)]

Thanks for the quick answer! Is there an easy way or a utility to transfer these characters into binary format?

[glitch (legacy member)]

You do not need any utilities. A unicode value contains two bytes. A value of \ue0c0 is encoded as 0xe0 and 0xc0 in the barcode. Your application takes care of the conversion (back and forth).

[thedave(Legacy Member)]

I appreciate the help, but I'm having a hard time following. I basically need to take an Arabic input letter (or string of letters) such as ج and encode them into a barcode. According the the Unicode chart I have, the letter ج is assigned Code 062C. Using the PDF417EncoderGUI, how would I be able to do this? I really appreciate any help you can give

[glitch (legacy member)]

PDF417 Encoder GUI does not encode Unicode.

What's your plan on the reading side? scanner will not give you Unicode values either. You can only read/write on a single-byte level.