Reply to post: Re: Poor Reliability.. better idea

Re: Poor Reliability.. better idea

[...] These lines match the number 6 [...]

Yeah, erm, no: because the encoding for each digit is actually 7 stripes wide, so "6" isn't "two narrow black lines", it's:

• "black-white-black-white-white-white-white", or
• "white-white-white-white-black-white-black", or
• "white-black-white-black-black-black-black"

There's three encodings for the other digits, too, then a way of encoding the first digit (in EAN-13) by swapping between encodings for the first 6 digits.

Barcode scanners work out which way round the barcode is by attempting to decode it: there's only one correct way.