[ale] programming question

[Michael C Martin]

While all this is very true (c'mon, this should be a well documented pattern / anti-pattern somewhere on the internets) .. How about this one -- use a FONT that is optically meant for easy visual discrimination of letters and numbers. Bonus -- font is easily scannable for image recognition. EG: Automotive VINs. Maintaining upper case only helps too. 

OCR fonts have been out for years. We just have to get "label manufacturers" to put these kind of specs / requirements in the design doc prior to any label scanning.

Alternative #2 -- use a high density digital coding (data matrix codes, Semacode) and then just use our smart phones to read and repurpose. Wait.. We all do have smart phones, right?

Giant Mike 



Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 10, 2016, at 8:07 AM, Brian Schenken <brian.schenken at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It depends.  The characters in serial numbers sometimes have a meaning - O could mean an item was assembled on production line O, etc. so you might have to change that logic a bit.  Assuming that the characters are all meaningless, you'd still have a bit of work to do if you want the alphanumeric text to increment while excluding certain characters.
> 
>> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 6:34 AM, Leam Hall <leamhall at gmail.com> wrote:
>> +1, and lower case "ell". Depending on the font, uppercase "D" is often suspect on printed labels.
>> 
>> 
>>> On 02/09/16 23:18, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
>>> 1 line of code.  B and 8 should be avoided as well as S and 5 too.
>>> 
>>>> On 02/09/16 20:45, Pete Hardie wrote:
>>>> It's not a programmer failure - it's a requirements failure.  Some
>>>> marketeer or architect failed to specify
>>>> "Serial number will not include letters I and O"
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 8:32 PM, Sean Kilpatrick <kilpatms at gmail.com
>>>> <mailto:kilpatms at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>      I know nothing of modern languages; I stopped learning  how to program
>>>>      at Cobol, Algol, and Fortran.
>>>>      But I have a question spinning off this serial number: F9IANU000217.
>>>> 
>>>>      Given that only a few lines of code should be necessary to create serial
>>>>      numbers, how much more code would be needed to exclude upper case "I"
>>>>      and "O"?
>>>> 
>>>>      This is the first time I have ever seen an upper case "I" used in a
>>>>      serial number.  The type face used for this serial number made it
>>>>      difficult to see that the third character was an "I" and not a "1".
>>>>      I have seen an upper case "O" used however, and that is even more
>>>>      stupid.
>>>> 
>>>>      For the record, the serial number above identifies an electronic device
>>>>      manufactured by a well-known company.  It didn't work out of the box,
>>>>      and after an hour with tech support I was told to return it as
>>>>      defective.
>>>> 
>>>>      Which I will do.
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