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SPHH
SPHH
Known Participant
July 12, 2022
Answered

inDesign | «é» glyph turns weird in QR-Code

  • July 12, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 2343 views

Hi,

When I output a QR-Code (Business-Card) in InDesign, users scanning the Code get a weird combination of characters instead of an «é». It looks like an ascii-issue or similar. How can I fix it ?

Cheers

🙂

G

Correct answer James Gifford—NitroPress

Hi Brad,


Updating the QR-mechanism would actually indeed fix a major part of the issue.
Or they might integrate a selector drop-down to choose the desired vCard version.
…would help a lot, I guess.

Regarding your suggestion : «use the plain text option and input your card in vCard 3 syntax», could you give any further hint where to find any examples of code / code-samples that suit those 3.0 requirements ? And where exactly the code should be inserted :

Edit QR-Code / Type / Plain Text … there ?

🙂


Here's one link you might find useful. I think what Brad is suggesting is that you write this code as "plain text=" and it should encode as a vCard 3 format, and parse correctly by compliant readers.

 

I'd still suggest the real solution is just to use a nice, free, readily-available, version-selectable QRcode generator instead of a handy but crippled ID menu option. But that's just me.

 

—

3 replies

M
matmosci
Participant
November 19, 2024

Give this tool a try, it exports qr codes with data merge source file for vcards and other types:
https://qr.lovepoly.online/

Brad @ Roaring Mouse
Community Expert
Brad @ Roaring MouseCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 13, 2022

Yes, it's an encoding issue. and it's the QR reader's fault.

InDesign is correctly writing the code for vCard 2.1 format, yet characters like your accented characters are supposed to be read as UTF-8, but for some reason iPhones and others aren't doing that. iPhones, it seems, only read v3.0 vCards properly (It screws up on vCard 4.0 as well).

Instead of using ID's built in Business Card template (which writes vCard 2.1), use the plain text option and input your card in vCard 3 syntax and it will work. Alternatively, in vCard 2.1, you can force the reader to decode the characters as UTF-8 by adding CHARSET=UTF-8 before the name fields. e.g. .....

 

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N;CHARSET=UTF-8:Lästname;René
FN;CHARSET=UTF-8:René Lästname
END:VCARD

 

    SPHH
    SPHHAuthor
    Known Participant
    July 28, 2022

    Hi Brad, and thank also you for your feedback !

    I had a talk this morning with someone at APPLE-Support, claiming that things are safe on the side of iOS. He also made a test with an Android-device, which apparently also returns the same issue … leading to the conclusion there might be some bug within the QR-Code-writing-process. It’s hard to define who’s right or not. At this point, the feedback of ADOBE’s_dev-team would be great. Anyone around, perhaps ?

    Regarding your suggestion : «use the plain text option and input your card in vCard 3 syntax», could you give any further hint where to find any examples of code / code-samples that suit those 3.0 requirements ? Not sure how to proceed on that point.

    Cheers 🙂

     

    G

    SPHH
    SPHHAuthor
    Known Participant
    July 28, 2022

    As I said, there's nothing WRONG with the code that InDesign is generating. It's actually only text after all, and it follows the specficiations of v2.1 vCard spec. Unfortunately, the phone manufacturers no longer support it. Apple states that they only support vCard 3.0 and up, which is their choice, but there's lots of existing QR codes out there using vCard 2.1.

     

    vCard 2.1 is US-ASCII by default. Individual properties can be overridden with the CHARSET= parameter.
    vCard 3.0 requires the mimetype to include a character set, e.g. Content-Type: text/vcard;charset=ISO-8859-1, but is assumed UTF-8 without it.
    vCard 4.0 is always UTF-8.

     

    The simple answer to this is if InDesign at least updated their QR mechanism to v3.0


    Hi Brad,


    Updating the QR-mechanism would actually indeed fix a major part of the issue.
    Or they might integrate a selector drop-down to choose the desired vCard version.
    …would help a lot, I guess.

    Regarding your suggestion : «use the plain text option and input your card in vCard 3 syntax», could you give any further hint where to find any examples of code / code-samples that suit those 3.0 requirements ? And where exactly the code should be inserted :

    Edit QR-Code / Type / Plain Text … there ?

    🙂

      James Gifford—NitroPress
      James Gifford—NitroPress
      Legend
      July 12, 2022

      There was a long discusson of this a few months ago. I don't remember the resolution but it seems to be peculiar to ID's QR code generator. If you can't use another generator and import the QR block as a graphics, see that topic — I believe there was a workaround for handling accented characters.

       

      Here's one discussion, I think there were others.

       

      —

        SPHH
        SPHHAuthor
        Known Participant
        July 28, 2022

        Thanks for your feedback, James !
        I wonder that this QR-Code-output-topic is still an issue today.
        🙂

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