Chinese characters not being supported in QR generator

[Caspian5E6D]

Paste some Chinese characters into to QR code editor and try and scan it. The characters are messed up. Tested in 19.3 and 19.4 (pre-release)

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

InDesign's form-driven vCard generator uses v2.1, which does not support any characters outside the base ASCII set.

You need to use the Plain Text option and format the data yourself, including the flag to use v3 or v4.

Here's a primer on advanced use of ID's QR code generator, which has links to full references on both the code and vCard/MeCard formats.

http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/DPR/dpr_qrcodes.php

[Caspian5E6D]

Thank you James. I had no idea. Now to go deep into how to properly format a plain text QR to display as a business card on IOS like it does for non-Chinese business card. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Pretty simple. A bit fussy, but simple and you have endless flexibility, all without data scraping or malware. A good skill to add.

Know that a lot depends on all the levels of this process, the most important one being a contact or data app that actually accepts the data fields and data. You can put it in there, but if the app/let doesn't want it, it will be ignored.

[Caspian5E6D]

Simple LOL. ChattyG insn't doing a great job at it either. Tried a vCard 4.0 but that didn't encode the Chinese characters. And then MeCard, which doesn't seem to have the ability seperate names...  Still working on the problem. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

Yeah, Chaggy is just great if you have the expertise to sort out its mistakes. 😛

If you have examples of QR codes with Chinese characters that work, you can 'disassemble' them at:

https://zxing.org/w/decode.jspx

That will give you the raw encoding, not the parsed result. But again keep in mind that there are four or five steps to success here, starting with a valid encode; a valid read and decode; a valid parsing of the data; and an app that will accept the data. Any of those can be a failure point, so make sure you're comparing apples to apples.

I also don't know what Chinese characters are valid. My vague understanding is that only the alphabetic Japanese characters are valid; it may be that only a simplified Chinese glyph set is recognized by the apps.

[Caspian5E6D]

James — Thank you. That page is exactly what I've been hunting for. I have their old QRs so I can unpack them and see what is going on. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It's surprisingly hard to find a raw, "diagnostic" QR code decoder. This one is aging and apparently not updated, which can cause issues with newer codes (or so it's reported), so don't be surprised if it is not as helpful to you, out there on the edge of things, as it might seem. Then again, it may give you exactly the feedback you need.

Insert rant here about how the co-option of QR codes by the pay services and mis-users has made it so hard to work with these useful elements.