Aztec Code

Aztec Code is a public-domain 2D matrix symbology with a distinctive square bullseye finder pattern, designed for easy printing and decoding.

Aztec Code was invented by Andy Longacre of Welch Allyn Inc. in 1995 and is in the public domain. It was designed for ease of printing and ease of decoding.

Its finder pattern consists of concentric square rings centered on a single dark module at the center of the symbol. A two-dimensional imaging device such as a CCD camera is required to scan the symbology. Aztec Code is designed with user-selectable percentages of error correction, and it supports industry-standard escape sequences to define international code pages and special encodation schemes. It is commonly used for small-item marking applications across a wide variety of printing and marking technologies. This document includes descriptions of the character encodation, symbol structure, reference decode algorithm, and symbol quality measurements for Aztec Code.

The symbols are square overall, laid out on a square grid with a square central bullseye finder. The smallest Aztec Code symbol is 15x15 modules, and the largest is 151x151. The smallest symbol encodes 13 numeric or 12 alphabetic characters, while the largest encodes 3,832 numeric characters, 3,067 alphabetic characters, or 1,914 bytes of data. No quiet zone is required outside the bounds of the symbol. There are 32 sizes in all, with user-selected amounts of Reed-Solomon error correction ranging from 5% to 95% of the data region.

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