Please add GS1 DataMatrix

[glockmane]

Should be a minor addition but really usefull.. Thank you for consideration!

[EszopiCoder]

I'll look into adding it in the future. I don't have a lot of free time to work on this at the moment. Feel free to contribute to the repository if you find a solution!

[glockmane]

Thanks for considering, the only difference is one single control character (FNC1), see here:

https://www.bluhmsysteme.com/blog/datamatrix-und-gs1-datamatrix-der-kleine-feine-unterschied/

But honestly I'm no programmer and have absolutely no clue how to even get this char..

[glockmane]

Is there any news on this? Saw a new Release this year, bud saidly no GS1 DataMatrix included ;)

[EszopiCoder]

Sorry for the very late reply. I haven’t been working on this project and currently don’t have plans to add anything to it.

…

On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 8:55 AM glockmane ***@***.***> wrote: Is there any news on this? Saw a new Release this year, bud saidly no GS1 DataMatrix included ;) — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ANK63OLQP5AXQSWV3ANDTW3YGSSVFAVCNFSM5M6XCFRKU5DIOJSWCZC7NNSXTN2JONZXKZKDN5WW2ZLOOQ5TCOBSG44TSMZQGUYQ> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[WarpQ]

I have a very simple modification that will do the trick, but it won't be backwards compatible so I'm not going to modify the code here. For Datamatrix, GS1 simply implies that application identifiers (AIs) are used. It is up to the user to comply with the rules in the GS1 standard (e.g., max field lengths etc.). To use AIs, the data stream must start with the FNC1 character, which is represented by Chr(232) or E8 in hex. If multiple AIs are used in one barcode, then the FNC1 character is used to terminate variable length fields. Fixed length fields do not need to be terminated.
The modification that I've made will interpret "\" as an escape character that won't be included in the code. "\F" will evaluate to the FNC1 character, while any other combination of "\" and a second character will evaluate to the second character, e.g., "\\" will insert "\" into the encoded string.
Modify the file modDataMatrix.bas:
Insert the following 7 lines between line 36 and line 37:

    ElseIf c = 92 Then 'escape character "\"
        If r = 70 Then 'FNC1: "\F"
           enc = enc + Chr(232)
        Else
           enc = enc + Chr(r + 1)
        End If
        i = i + 1

I'm not sure how this modification will behave if extended characters are used - it most likely just won't make a difference. If the datastring ends with a single "\" character, then Chr(1) will be inserted at the end of the encoded string. So it's safe to use, but since any previous encodings of the character "\" will have to be re-encoded using "\\", it's not 100% backwards compatible.

Example of usage:
=DataMatrix("\F10abcde")
will make a GS1 compliant datamatrix with the AI 10 (batch number) and specifying the data "abcde"

Enjoy.