Understanding 2D barcodes in Adobe Acrobat & Reader

By Lori DeFurio – March 1, 2006

 

Capturing data from paper forms - usually through labor-intensive and error-prone re-keying of text -- is a significant challenge and expense for many organizations. A degree of automation can be achieved through scanning and character recognition, but the character-interpretation process still introduces errors. Acrobat 7.0 offers the ability to embed a 2D barcode in a PDF form, which can be decoded to extract user-supplied data with greater efficiency and accuracy. Lori DeFurio of Adobe Systems provides an overview of how this technology works, and explains how to add a 2D barcode to your form and then extract the data after printing the document. This article is available as a PDF download, which includes an attached sample PDF form with barcode.