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The SkewTolerance property is used for the detection of barcodes in skewed documents, but it can have a negative impact on the performance of the ScanBarCode command, especially when reading PDf-417 and Datamatrix barcodes. One solution to this problem is to use xml settings, which allow you to store sets of properties which are applied successively until a barcode is decoded.

For example, if you create a an xml file containing…

<xml version=’1.0′ encoding=’iso-8859-1′>
<SoftekBarcode>
<Properties>
<ReadCode39>1</ReadCode39>
<ReadCode25>1</ReadCode25>
<ReadPDF417>1</ReadPDF417>
<ReadDataMatrix>1</ReadDataMatrix>
<MultipleRead>1</MultipleRead>
<ReadCode128>1</ReadCode128>
<ScanDirection>15</ScanDirection>
<MinLength>4</MinLength>
<MaxLength>999</MaxLength>
<ShowCheckDigit>1</ShowCheckDigit>
<SkewTolerance>0</SkewTolerance>
</Properties>
<Properties>
<SkewTolerance>5</SkewTolerance>
</Properties>
</SoftekBarcode>
</xml>

…and in your code replace the lines where you set the properties of the toolkit with one line:

barcode.LoadXMLSettings(“settings.xml”)

Then, when you call ScanBarCode, the toolkit will first apply tthe settings in the first section of the xml file and only set SkewTolerance to 5 if it wasn’t able to read a barcode in the normal orientations.