![]() ![]() ![]() When printing barcodes for industrial barcode scanners (both linear and 2D) it is a good practice to keep the X Dimension greater than 7.5 mils (0.0075 inches). The units of this in BarTender are “mils” where one mil = 0.001 inches. For 2D barcodes, such as Datamatrix and QR Codes, this dimension is the width of the small elements that make up the code. This is actually a reference to linear barcodes, such as UPC codes, where the X Dimension is the width of the small bar in the barcode. The size of the barcode elements is determined by the “X Dimension”. Here’s a screenshot from the label design software I use, BarTender: What we are interested in is the Element Size – the size of the little individual squares that make up the barcodes. Well actually we could do that, but it doesn’t really help here. Generally we wouldn’t measure the size of a Datamatrix or QR Code and say “this QR Code is 1 inch square”. One important thing is to understand how we define the size of a barcode. It really doesn’t matter which you choose, in either case it is important that the barcode is small enough to be able to fit inside the space allocated for it, but large enough to be successfully scanned every time – we’ve all been frustrated by 2D barcodes that won’t scan (or scan but don’t do what they are supposed to do – that’s a different story!) and we don’t want to annoy our potential clients. I think every scanning app I’ve come across supports QR, but not every one can read Datamatrix. To start, if you are planning to use a 2D barcode in a project, chances are that it will be either Datamatrix or QR Code that you are turning to.īeing an industrial barcoding guy, I would normally turn to Datamatrix, but the QR Code has become very popular for all kinds of mobile applications and probably has a bigger infrastructure of scanning apps that can read it. I had to do some testing on this for one of our clients and I thought it would be interesting to share the results here as well. So you need to produce a 2D barcode for use with mobile devices? What size should it be to ensure that every smartphone can successfully read it? ![]()
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