Introduction

Codablock F is the 2D extension of Code 128. Codablock is a stacked symbology from ICS Identcode-Systeme. It was invented by Heinrich Oehlmann and was originally a stack of Code 39 symbols.

Within its capacities, it is possible to cut a given Code 128 into several pieces and to arrange them in a multy row symbol. This procedure is depicted on the title page. It full fills the following features:
· flexible in size, may contain 2 to 44 rows of 1 to 61 data characters (up to 122 for numeric data per row), the rows have constant physical length.
· fits applications for small space and high data amount
· autodiscrimination to Code 128 and all other common bar codes
· Code 128 only equipment may be used
· printing: consists of standard Code 128 rows
· scanning: a second level decoder may decode the original message using only the decoded ASCII-Data of the rows. In this configuration, the autodiscrimination feature against Code 128 is not available
· secured by two mod-86 check sums in addition to the row check sums
· supported by common bar code equipment

The following features are inherited from Code 128:
· full ASCII character set. 8-bit character set is available using the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set (FNC4).
· numeric compression: allows to encode blocks of numbers (minimum 4) using only the half of the usual space.
· secured by a row checksum with modulo 103.
· block concatenation (FNC2).
· EAN version (FNC1).

For more information visit www.ics-ident.de.