Bar Code Standards

In the barcode arena, AIM has long been the traditional source of the technology standards. The most used of the AIM standards have now been adopted by ISO and can be obtained from the ISO organization.

The ISO bar code standards are:

Current status

For those bar code symbologies that are not published as ISO standards, you can visit AIM (http://www.aimglobal.org) to find the specification.

Symbology standards are also available from other organizations. For example, the U.P.C. and EAN symbologies are available from UCC and EAN. Most proprietary symbologies are only available from their respective inventors.

What is a Symbology Standard?

A symbology specifications give all the details necessary to print or scan a barcode. The documents range from 8 pages to 120 pages, so you can see that there is a lot of information needed to create a barcode.

Looking at a standard from a very simplistic level, it must contain:

• A definition of the width of the bars and the spaces.

• A method to define each character that is encodable (whether numeric only or full ASCII).

• The start and stop characters

• Any check character support built in

• Any free space needed around the symbology to allow for a clean decode

From these basic definitions, it then gets to be complicated as error correction becomes a factor and as we start to talk about non-linear symbologies. With some of the two dimensional symbologies allowing the encodation of several kilobytes of data, on a symbol that may be several square inches in size, it become important to fully define the "rules" for a symbology.

Need to know more about ISO Standards?

• What are Standards?
• Learn how ISO works
• Learn about ISO/IEC SC31 standards