News

The main changes for version 7.6.1 are in the areas of performance control and recognition of skewed bar codes.

Performance Control

TimeOut is a new property that specifies the maximum amount of time the toolkit should spend searching for a barcode within a single page of a document. It does not include the time taken to load a page from disk into memory. The property defaults to 5000 (ms) and so could potentially cause different behaviour to previous versions. To remove the time out the property to be set to a value of 0.

MaxBarcodesPerPage is also a new property and specifies the maximum number of barcodes expected in a single page of an image. This has the potential to dramatically improve the speed of processing because the toolkit will stop processing a page as soon as a bar code is discovered. Note that this property only has effect if MultipleRead is set to True. The default is 0 which means no limit to the number of barcodes on a single page.

There are 2 other new properties in this area:

When UseFastScan is True and only 1 bar code is expected on a page, the toolkit will perform an initial high speed scan of an image. If it cannot find a bar code using the fast scan then the normal slower scan will take place.

BarcodesAtTopOfPage can improve performance if MultipleRead is False or MaxBarcodesPerPage is non-zero. When set to True the toolkit will start the search at the top of a page.

Skewed Barcodes

Version 7.6.1 can handle certain types of skewed bar code differently to previous versions and the following properties may remove the need to use the SkewTolerance property for certain bar codes.

When the SkewedLinear property is True (default) the toolkit will decode many skewed 1-D bar codes that previous versions would only decode with with the use of the SkewTolerance property. The SkewedDatamatrix property works in a similar way.

Reporting of Unread Barcodes

This version of the toolkit also has some limited capabilities to report bar codes that could not otherwise be detected.

ReportUnreadBarcodes is a mask that controls the reporting of barcodes that could not otherwise be successfully decoded. Please note the following limitations:

• Maximum of 1 unread barcode reported per page
• No unread barcodes reported on a page where another barcode was successfully read.
• Linear barcodes must consist of at least 40 black bars.
• 2-D barcodes will only be reported if they reach and fail the error correction phase of decoding.
• Any large series of parallel lines will be reported as an unread linear barcode
• All unread barcodes reported as type “UNREAD” with value “UNREAD”
• The appropriate 2-D type must be enabled to detect unread barcodes of that type.
• If a linear barcode type is disabled then barcodes of that type may be reported as unread.

Other changes

• Support for <PropertyName/> as an alternative to <PropertyName></PropertyName>
• Auto detection of UTF8 data via QRCodeAutoUTF8 advanced property.
• Can now handle QRCodes containing ECI data. ECI value of 26 is now recognized as an indicator that data is encoded using UTF8 format.
• FNC1 characters are now handled correctly in datamatrix barcodes.
• Support for mirrored QR-Codes.
• SoftekSDKDemo command line options added.
• Added function mtGetRawBarString for applications that need to handle binary data.
• Added new advanced property called Pdf417ChannelMode.