Encoding Kanji Characters in QR Code® Compaction Mode

Encoding Kanji Characters in QR Code® Compaction Mode

Data for QR-Code can be treated either as a sequence of Bytes or as a sequence of SHIFT JIS characters.

Beside SHIFT JIS so-called “ECIs” can be used to switch to different Code-Pages - but ECIs are often unsupported by decoder software.

The default character set of QR-Code is Shift JIS. In order to use the QR-Code Kanji Compaction Mode (more efficient), the input for the encoder must be in a specific character set:

TBarCode DLL V7, TBarCode/X Library Version 7

Input must be in Multi Byte Character Set Format SHIFT JIS (not UTF-8, not Unicode!).

• Single Bytes characters are encoded according to JIS X 0201.
• Double Byte characters are encoded according to Shift JIS X 0208.

TBarCode DLL V8, TBarCode/X Library Version 8 (and later)

Input must be in Unicode (UTF-16 in Windows Version and UTF-32/UCS-4 in Linux/UNIX Version).

Double Byte characters contained in the Shift JIS X 0208-1990 table can be compacted in QR-Code 13-Bit Mode. To enable the compaction in the TBarCode Library you have to call the function

BCSet_QR_KanjiChineseCompaction (pBarcode, eQRMBCompactionKanji)

Here are some links to background information about Kanji and Unicode:

• Shift JIS character table
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift-JIS
• DBCS/Unicode Mapping Tables: Code Page 932
• http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/en/general-info/sjis.html