Participant

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InDesign QR generator and diacritic characters in V card

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
February 17, 2023
4 replies
7391 views

How to input diacritic characters (like é) in the QR code generatosr?

Option+e e results in √â if scanned

How to

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Correct answer James Gifford—NitroPress

The short answer is that you can't. The QR code creator in InDesign defaults to v2.1 of vCard, which does not support the extended character set.

The only solution is to use another QR code creator, one that does support vCard v3.0 (or 4.0, although my sense is that 4 is not widely supported yet). The problem there is that there are no good creation tools and apps among the hundreds out there — all, or most, seem to be crippled by things like added tracking, data scraping, binding the code to a pay platform, etc.

I am, oddly enough, in the middle of writing a long info/how-to article on using InDesign's QR code generator (which is trustworthy, standalone and transparent) to manually create a variety of data types, including vCard 3 and 4, but it's not done yet.

The short answer, if it's not too cryptic, is to use the Plain Text mode to enter the vCard format manually. It's not complex, but it is a bit involved. If you can't find a good example of vCard structure, try the Wikipedia article (not something I say very often!) as a start, and if you can wait, I should have this reference article done sometime this weekend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard

You should be able to cut and paste the example structure into the Plain Text field, add any fields you want, and export successfully. If not, try again. 🙂

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Just to close out this thread (hopefully) with useful info — it is harder to find a good "diagnostic" QR code reader than I thought. The nature of the micro-industry just seems to prevent anyone from creating and then maintaining something that doesn't generate revenue.

But for anyone who wants to look at the bare bones of a QR code's data, from the raw encoding string to the stripped and parsed data, and a few other useful bits (although not the error correction mode — that would be nice), this web tool seems to be trustworthy, stable and useful. It is basically orphaned and no longer updated, and there are comments that it and some possible device apps have trouble with some newer iterations of code, but it's the best we have, more or less:

ZXing Decoder Online

and a sample decode:

Tedvat

Participant

Hi guys.

Try to put ";VERSION:3.0" in one of the input boxes.

I put it right behind the title i used, it dosn't show

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Does not work (reliably); does not overwrite VERSION:2.1 string in the data. Whether it does so on data parsing is probably up to the device. Don't use this hack; use Plain Text and properly structured vCard data instead.

Rishabh_Tiwari

Legend

I am so sorry for the confusion. Please avoid my previous response as I didn't tested this on a V-Card. Instead, it was a plain text. On testing it further, I am getting the same character, so I'll get this checked from the team and will update the discussion.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Yes, this is a longstanding limitation of the QR code creator — it only produces v2.1 codes, and v2.1 does not support accented characters on most readers, most notably iOS's. (But, hey, nobody uses that, so it's not a problem! 🙂 )

Adobe really, really needs to either update the code creator to use v3.0, or allow selection of the version. I don't think there would be any problem at all if it was just hard-coded to v3.0, except possibly with some very old and outdated readers.

Overall workaround article coming, as I noted.

Rishabh_Tiwari

Legend

Thank you for confirming @James Gifford—NitroPress I'll share the feedback with the team.

Rishabh_Tiwari

Legend

Hi @axelr16807532 ,

Thank you for reaching out. I tested this on my end, and it seems to be working. Would you mind testing it on a different device/scanner? Some scanners may not support certain character encodings, so it's important to test the QR code on different devices.

Let us know if it works, or a different device or if you still need further assistance.

Regards

Rishabh

James Gifford—NitroPressCorrect answer

Legend

The short answer is that you can't. The QR code creator in InDesign defaults to v2.1 of vCard, which does not support the extended character set.

The only solution is to use another QR code creator, one that does support vCard v3.0 (or 4.0, although my sense is that 4 is not widely supported yet). The problem there is that there are no good creation tools and apps among the hundreds out there — all, or most, seem to be crippled by things like added tracking, data scraping, binding the code to a pay platform, etc.

I am, oddly enough, in the middle of writing a long info/how-to article on using InDesign's QR code generator (which is trustworthy, standalone and transparent) to manually create a variety of data types, including vCard 3 and 4, but it's not done yet.

The short answer, if it's not too cryptic, is to use the Plain Text mode to enter the vCard format manually. It's not complex, but it is a bit involved. If you can't find a good example of vCard structure, try the Wikipedia article (not something I say very often!) as a start, and if you can wait, I should have this reference article done sometime this weekend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard

You should be able to cut and paste the example structure into the Plain Text field, add any fields you want, and export successfully. If not, try again. 🙂

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Here's a shortcut that might help.

Create your vCard QR code as before. In InDesign, hover over it until the popup appears. That will contain the actual text string of the code. Copy it into a Plain Text QR field, but update the second line to VERSION:3.0.

That should work. (To help with the popup string, you might grab a screen snip to look at while you retype it.)

axelr16807532Author

Participant

Thanks James, the workaround works perfect!

Converted the input to tekst, changed version to 3.0, typed the diacritic characters and copied it as plain tekst in QR generator in ID: problem solved!

Have a great weekend all

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