We all know bar codes. For several decades now, the bar codes have been emblazoned on all goods to reveal to the beeping cash register exactly what wants to be bought. With the spread of smartphones, we got another barcode in our everyday lives in the form of the square, black-and-white data matrix boxes, which now promise further links and information everywhere on billboards and in newspapers (but unfortunately often fail to deliver on this promise – the creators of these codes usually fail to provide more than just a simple link).

In addition to these two well-known barcode variants, there is a plethora of others, which of course the technophile cachers do not stop at in order to make their information as unreadable as possible. However, these contents are not really encrypted, but you usually need suitable software on your smartphone or PC to elicit human-readable barcode information. Of course, this can usually be done with brains and knowledge, if you only know how a certain barcode is structured and which one you are trying to decode. The code list from which Code 39 is constructed can be admired at Wikipedia – Code 39. It is also available as a ttf font.

If you have the world-wide web at your disposal, you will be almost overwhelmed with websites offering at least the standard codes for translation. If it gets a bit more complicated, the code is less readable, I like to use the software bcTester. When I’m on the road, I’ve found that multiple barcode readers in the smartphone are the better choice. Several smartphones are the best. In the worst case, you can also photograph what you find and – hopefully – read and decode it with another device.

Barcodes originated from the requirement to be able to attach machine-readable information that is as unambiguous as possible. For this reason, the well-known EAN commodity codes contain checksums, so misreading is almost impossible. Otherwise, this code contains only digits, represented in bars and gaps of different widths. Other codes can also represent ascii characters or extended character sets. The most content can be found in the two-dimensional codes, the datamatrixes.  

Here is a small and by no means complete overview of better-known barcodes

Weitere Codebeispiele:

• http://www.logicalconcepts.eu/wDeutsch/autoid/barcodetypen/index.html?navid=21
• http://www.activebarcode.de/codes/

Wer gerne selber Barcodes unter Windows erstellen möchte, dem kann ich (Stand: Erstellung dieses Blogbeitrages) den Zint Barcode Generator empfehlen. Simpel, selbsterklärend und erstellt über 50 verschiedene Barcodes.