The reason I’m asking this is the company I work for develops an application which has a barcode reader functionality. The device we develop these softwares for has a very limited resolution camera (2MP). Now they want me to set a benchmark for the maximum length barcode pattern which is scannable. So what I’m trying to do is use an online barcode generator of CODE-128 and then feed various length strings to it. If I knew what pattern results in the most dense/unreadable barcode I’d be able to create different patterns using that.
It’s been a long time since I looked at bar codes, but this link is to an old printer manual that has some useful information in its appendix: https://www.cognitivetpg.com//assets/downloads/105-008-02_Programming_Manual-HTML_revC2.pdf
I’ll look into it. Just trying to find the most hard to read barcode which can be formed from a given string length. Preferable in encoding 128
Barcodes are binary. Why not just create a string of alternating 1s and 0s with the occasional double number, then convert that into the format you need and generate the Barcode out of it.
I have no idea how barcodes work honestly. My reasoning behind asking this question is that since each pattern encodes a different string, so I’m trying to find the most illegible barcode which can be formed from a given string. Then I’ll try to scan that with my device and the maximum length string/barcode which I can scan will be the value I’m looking for.
Can you help me understand how to follow through with this approach or if there’s any problems in it?
I also don’t know much about barcodes other than what I just read in the Wikipedia article, but my assumption would be you could find a bunch of characters with the most 1 widths (they will all add up to 11 though). For extra points you could calculate the check digit and make it ‘hard to read’ too.