Datasheet

4 - 2
mation, you simply glide the pen over a line of text. As you scan, an image con-
sisting of intense points (so-called “pixels”) on a lighter background is generated
and transmitted to the PC. The IRISPen software now takes over.
All this applies to bar codes as well. The one difference is in the processing:
the image captured with the pen scanner contains black and white bars, not char-
acters, and the software analyzes these bars, not characters shapes, to extract a
sequence of symbols.
Bar codes are composed of parallel bars and spaces between them. Pre-
defined combinations of bars and spaces represent specific characters. The struc-
ture of a bar code is actually very similar to that of a Morse coded message:
where Morse code represents characters with dots and dashes, bar codes repre-
sent symbols with successive dark and white bars.
There are several bar code standards such as Codabar, Interleaved 2 of 5,
Code 39 etc. Appendix C of this manual discusses these “symbologies” in greater
detail and contains some samples of bar codes the IRISPen can read with great
ease.
Summing up, the IRISPen software analyzes the succession of dark and white
bars to detect the characters the bar code contains. The PBR technology from
I.R.I.S. - PBR is short for “Pen Bar Code Reading” - analyzes low-quality im-
ages which are the result of manual, unstable scanning; skewed, wavy and dis-
torted scans are dealt with beautifully.
The sequence of extracted characters is, as when you read text information,
inserted at the cursor position of the active Windows application. Use the IRISPen’s
bar code reading and you can enter bar code data into all Windows applications
without any integration effort.
5chapter4.p65 2/16/2001, 3:25 PM2