Standards Development
This International Standard specifies the requirements of the output interface of a barcode decoder and devices which may emulate a bar code decoder like a RFID Reader or an OCR reader.
Bar code scanners were designed at their appearance in the 20th century using a serial interface. While barcode symbology specifications were constantly evolving, the standardized output technology did stay at this stage.
Nevertheless, we focus new trends on two fields: on one hand, new interfaces like a smartphone app or keyboard interface are very common today. On the other hand, bar-code is not only used in the 7-bit ASCII world but arrived in the Unicode world covering many character sets like Cyrillic, Chinese, Korean etc.
This document aims to specify the application interface of barcode-scanners facing those new application fields.
We currently see a lot of legacy solutions for the following fields:
- handling of special characters (ex. Automotive shipping label and limited PLC reader device)
- handling of non-ASCII character sets (branch solutions instead standards for Names, Car licence plates)
- handling of binary or encrypted data
This standard addresses all of them by the following features:
- standard replacement characters for not processable characters
- Unicode UTF-8 transformation of the message included in the decoder for a limited fix set of encodings
- Clear rules for binary data
In addition, potential security issues introduced by malicious codes or wrong interpretation are addressed by a clear interface.
Current market needs are:
- Automotive industry requires to encode licence plates in non-ASCII character sets within logistic bar codes.
- Usage of bar codes in countries with non-ASCII character sets require clear rules which will lead to interoperability instead of legacy solutions. One example is the use of QR code compaction modes as character set indications
- Barcodes with binary contents are in wide use but are a potential danger for being not protected
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