Correction Level (PDF417)

The PDF417 symbology supports 9 levels of error correction, with 0 being the least thorough and 8 being the most. When the correction level is set to 0, very little redundant information is encoded and the scanner can do little more than correct for the very simplest of errors. When set to 8, significant scanning problems can be corrected.

Automatic Determination of Correction Level

The default error correction for PDF417 is "Auto." This automatically specifies a correction level based on the amount of information encoded into each PDF417 symbol.

If you will be using the PDF417 symbology in a closed system (that is, you control both the printing and the scanning of the symbol) and you have a high degree of confidence in your printing and reading capabilities, you may be able to successfully reduce the printed size of your symbols by manually specifying a relatively low correction level (as an alternative to "Auto"). On the other hand, if your print quality is questionable, your barcodes are subject to damaging conditions in the field, or you know that a wide variety of scanning equipment may be used by different people, you may wish to manually specify a higher correction value, even though it will result in a larger printed symbol.

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