Codablock F

Codablock F is a stacked 2D extension of Code 128, letting large amounts of data be encoded in a compact, multi-row symbol using standard Code 128 equipment.

Codablock F is the 2D extension of Code 128. Codablock is a stacked symbology from ICS Identcode-Systeme. It was invented by Heinrich Oehlmann and was originally a stack of Code 39 symbols.

Within its capabilities, a given Code 128 message can be split into several pieces and arranged in a multi-row symbol. This procedure is depicted on the title page. It fulfils the following features:

• flexible in size — may contain 2 to 44 rows of 1 to 61 data characters (up to 122 for numeric data per row); the rows have a constant physical length.
• suits applications requiring small space and a high data amount
• autodiscrimination against Code 128 and all other common bar codes
• standard Code 128-only equipment may be used
• printing consists of standard Code 128 rows
• scanning: a second-level decoder may decode the original message using only the decoded ASCII data of the rows. In this configuration, the autodiscrimination feature against Code 128 is not available
• secured by two mod-86 checksums in addition to the row checksums
• supported by common bar code equipment

The following features are inherited from Code 128:

• full ASCII character set. An 8-bit character set is available using the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set (FNC4).
• numeric compression: allows blocks of numbers (minimum 4) to be encoded using only half the usual space.
• secured by a row checksum with modulo 103.
• block concatenation (FNC2).
• EAN version (FNC1).

For more information visit www.ics-ident.de.