Grid Matrix

LabeljoyNew version

Grid Matrix is a Chinese 2D barcode, laid out as a grid of square blocks and made to hold Chinese text compactly. Outside China few scanners read it.

A Grid Matrix, a square made of a grid of smaller
blocks, holding Labeljoy and two Chinese characters.

What it holds
CharactersSimplified Chinese - the characters of the GB 2312 standard - and letters, digits and symbols.
LengthUp to 2,751 digits or 1,836 letters.
Error correctionAutomatic error correction, or from 10% to 50% of the symbol.
Readable textNone.
Settings
SizeAutomatic size picks the smallest symbol the value fits, from 018x018 to 162x162 modules. When the value doesn't fit the size you chose, Labeljoy uses a bigger one.
Error correctionAutomatic error correction depends on the size: 50% for the smallest, 40% for the next two, 30% above. With a fixed Size it's greyed out and set to Automatic error correction.
Character SetDefault character set is GB 2312, as the standard has it. UTF-8 holds any character, but only a scanner set up for it reads it right; ASCII and ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) hold no Chinese.

Characters you can't type. A tilde followed by three digits is the character with that code - ~013 is a carriage return - and ~~ is a tilde.

The rest of the settings - quiet zone, color - are in the Barcode section.

What goes wrong
Input data too long.The value doesn't fit even the largest Grid Matrix.
Some characters don't fit in this character set: choose UTF-8 in Character Set.The value has a character the Character Set can't hold - with Default character set, a euro sign or a character outside GB 2312.