When is a barcode not a barcode?
Have you ever looked at the back of a driver's license and wondered what that weird looking barcode is? Well, my strange brain is always inquisitive and the other day I was looking at mine and decided to see if I could take a photo of it and get the data from it. The first thing to do was to work out the format of the barcode. This was where I found that it isn't actually a barcode. It is a special type of pdf called PDF417. PDF417 was developed in 1991 by Dr. Ynjiun P. Wang. I could bore you with the format of PDF417, but really t he PDF417 symbol consists of 3 to 90 rows. So now I knew what I was dealing with, how was I going to pull it apart? First I needed to know if there was a third party library out there that can read PDF417. I was in luck ZXing.NET has a library that can read bar codes. It can also read PDF417!!! Eureka, I was one step closer. Being a .Net geek I wired up Visual studio. Made a quick console app. Imported the ZXing package and...