Unicode characters in barcodes

dLSoft Active Barcode components, dBarcode.NET components, dBarcode DLLs and 2D Barcode Font Kits support encoding non-ASCII character sets (such as Korean, Japanese, etc.) for those barcode types that include a byte mode, and the components that support QR Code also support the Kanji mode. The components Flag property may be set to interpret the Caption property (the input data) as a Unicode string and convert it to a byte stream for encoding in the byte modes available to Aztec, Datamatrix, PDF417 and QR Code barcodes.

WARNING: Do NOT scan these barcodes into non-Unicode applications on your system if you are using a keyboard wedge scanner (or a USB scanner emulating a keyboard wedge). Scanning these symbols into non-Unicode applications will cause some byte-pairs to be interpreted as control characters which could produce unpredictable results.

Most USB scanner manufacturers provide a driver which can emulate a serial port. A sample .NET program for accepting a scan from a serial port scanner and translating the result into Unicode is available here.

Arabic encoded into a Datamatrix symbol - encoded using Unicode

Kanji encoded into a QR Code symbol

While QR Code's Kanji mode is supported by relevant barcode scanners, Unicode may not be supported by all scanners. A sample .NET program for accepting a scan from a serial port scanner and translating the result into Unicode is available here.