Overview

The PDF417 symbology is 2D stacked-linear barcode. It can encode full 256 character extended-ASCII.

Invoking

• The data field can contain any extended ASCII data.

• When the parse option is specified, any instances of ^NNN in the data field are replaced with their equivalent ASCII value, useful for specifying unprintable characters.
• The eclevel option is used to specify the error correction level, from 1 to 5. The default is to choose a standard level of error correction that is determined by the encoded data length.
  
• The columns option specifies the number of columns (or groups of bars) in the output symbol, from 1 to 30. This option is mandatory.
  
• The rows option specifies the minumum number of rows in the symbol, from 3 to 90.
  
• If rows is unspecified, the encoder will select a number that creates a symbol that is the minimum size to represent the given data.
  
• The rowmult option is used to specify how tall each bar is, with respect to the minimum module width. The default is 3.
  
• The compact option is used to create a compact/truncated PDF417 symbol that has fewer bars per row that a standard symbol and hence is more narrow.
  
• The format option is used to select between full and micro format symbol types. By default, full format symbols will be generated.
• The raw option denotes that the data field is providing the input as a pre-encoded codewords in ^NNN format, suitable for direct low-level encoding.

Examples

0 0 moveto (PDF417) (columns=2) pdf417

0 0 moveto (P^068F417) (parse columns=2 rows=15) pdf417

0 0 moveto (A truncated PDF417) (columns=4 compact) pdf417

0 0 moveto (Strong error correction) (columns=2 eclevel=5) pdf417

0 0 moveto (^453^178^121^239) (raw columns=2) pdf417