← Back to context

Comment by Terr_

13 hours ago

More or less, AFAICT the underlying barcode standards don't support Unicode, if that's what you mean.

It looks like Code 128 could potentially handle some ISO-8859-1 accented latin characters, but I'm not sure how to test it.

Code 128 supports some ISO-8859-1 indeed, but it requires switching between encodings (there are 3 of them), and couldn't work with 128B (I guess the one used by the font, as it supports ASCII). See the table on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_128

  • actually it seems they support 128A 128B and 128C with the correct encoder.

      To use these fonts you have to use an encoder like the one below. It is an optimizing encoder, that means, it produces the shortest barcode that can encode the input. For this the encoder, if necessary or shorter, switches between the three available Code Sets (list from Wikipedia):
    

    https://graphicore.github.io/librebarcode/documentation/code...

Even with plain ASCII we sometime struggle with the various scanners, as they emulate keyboards. So for instance using : in the barcode as a separator of values becomes wonky if the OS has a different input language than expected.