PDF417 (ISO 15438) - Barcode Type¶

Heavily used in the parcel industry, the PDF417 symbology can encode a vast amount of data into a small space. Zint supports encoding up to the ISO standard maximum symbol size of 925 codewords which (at error correction level 0) allows a maximum data size of 1850 text characters, or 2710 digits. The width of the generated PDF417 symbol can be specified at the command line using the --cols switch followed by a number between 1 and 30, and the amount of check digit information can be specified by using the --security switch followed by a number between 0 and 8 where the number of codewords used for check information is determined by 2(value + 1). If using the API, these values are assigned to option_2 and option_1 respectively. The default level of check information is determined by the amount of data being encoded. International text support is provided using the Latin-1 character set as described in Appendix A. A separate symbology ID can be used to encode Health Industry Barcode (HIBC) data which adds a leading '+' character and a modulo-49 check digit to the encoded data.