Chinese characters not being supported in QR generator

Question

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 · Accepted Answer

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.

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.

James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

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

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