Encoding (encoding)

The Encoding property sets the encoding for non-ASCII characters in the code value.

This property is used by the pdf-417, qr-code, and gs1-qr-code bar code types.

Type: String.

You can find the Encoding property in the Bar Code category of the Properties view.

PDF-417

Run "java CharsetInfo" for a list of character set encodings available on a particular platform. Valid example values are ISO-8859-15 or IBM437.

Fails if: The specified encoding is not in the list of encodings returned by the java CharsetInfo command.

Default value: Not set (the lower 8 bits of the unicode values are encoded).

QR-Code and GS1-QR-Code

In the QR-Code and GS1-QR-Code bar codes, the following are valid values:

Encoding Type Description
ISO-8859-1 Use this setting if all characters in codeValue are from this code page. Some scanners or scanner apps interpret the non-ASCII characters non standard (e.g. as Japanese characters). In this case the scanner may have a setting to change the interpretation. If this is not the case then try using "UTF-8" encoding. Please note that for ISO-8859-1 encoding no ECI code is embedded (Use the encoding ISO-8859-15 to force an ECI inclusion.)
Bytes Use this setting to set the byte values. Literal characters in codeValue are mapped to ISO-8859-1 byte representation and characters not representable in XML documents can be escaped by a backslash ('\') character followed by a 3 digit octal literal. The backslash character itself can be escaped by a sequence of two backslash characters or its octal representation \134 in ISO-8859-1.
UTF-8 This is the default value and should be used unless the two other options from above are applicable. If a scanner fails to interpret the characters correctly and all character in codeValue are available from a different encoding listed by CharsetInfo, then this encoding should be tried next.
Any encoding listed by CharsetInfo (e.g. "Shift_JIS", "Big5" or "ISO-8859-8") If all of the option above are not applicable this option should be used. For encodings for which a ECI code exists, the code will be embedded allowing the scanner to change the interpretation accordingly.
Any encoding listed by CharsetInfo prefixes with the string "RAW-" (e.g. "RAW-Shift_JIS", "RAW-Big5" or "RAW-UTF-8" Some scanners do not recognize ECI codes and expect a specific encoding (other than ISO-8859-1). For this case, this setting should be used.

Fails if: Value is not a valid encoding name.

Default value: UTF-8.