Printing Keys and using OCR.

[Ryan Malayter]

On 5/15/07, Casey Jones <groups at caseyljones.net> wrote:
> There appears to be an open source project going for PDF417
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF417

We've used PDF417 for conference attendee badges in the past. They
work well, and there seems to be quite a bit of hardware and software
out there to support them.

However, using *any* secondary encoding technique mroe complex than
base64 is going to make recovery of the key that much more difficult
down the road. Have you ever tried to recover a 15 year old file from
floppy or tape? Just figuring out what the file format *is* can be a
challenge.

I would suggest using plain old base64 ASCII and a large version of a
font like OCR-A or OCR-B. You can include par2 information, also
base64 encoded, but finding software to use that data for recovery may
be difficult many years in the future. Simply printing multiple copies
of the page for OCR and diffing for errors would probably be easier.

Finally, consider the paper and ink/toner you use... some cheaper
paper is very acid, and some toner flakes over time.

Regards,

-- 
   RPM