marco.kaywa.com

I've just spent a couple hours playing with our QR Code generator and here are the results: please welcome... color QR Codes!

The KAYWA Reader seems to handle colored codes pretty well, as long as the light color stays clearer than the dark one, and there is enough contrast between the two.

Just give it a try: can you decode the QR Code to the left?

Generating colored codes is pretty straightforward, here is how it works: all you have to do is to specify the parameters in the URI of the requested QR Code itself:

http://qrcode.kaywa.com/code/ F S DARK-COLOR LIGHT-COLOR / DATA

...where:

• F is the desired format ("P" or "F") of the generated code. More on this later.
• S is the size (in QR Code "units") of the code, from 4 to 12.
• DARK-COLOR is the color of the darker color, in web-color format. For example 000077 for a dark blue.
• LIGHT-COLOR is just the same, but for the light color. For example 44aa44 for a light green.
• DATA is the actual (url-encoded) data you want to encode in the QR Code.

Note that any of these arguments can be skipped!

Confused? Here are a couple examples that should clarify the matter for you:

• http://qrcode.kaywa.com/code/83344ff/20207996

  Has a size of 8 and a dark color code #3344ff. The light color defaults to white.

• http://qrcode.kaywa.com/code/p000000ffcccc/20207995

  Is a PNG QR Code, having a default size, a black dark color (#000000) and a light color code of #ffcccc.

Still confused? Not sure how to obtain a given color? You can simply copy/paste the colors out of this table.

But back to our QR Codes...it gets even better: you can get a PDF document for any QR Code, just by setting the format parameter to "F"! For example, the URI of the last code above, in PDF format, is:

http://qrcode.kaywa.com/code/f000000ffcccc/20207995

Now, how neat is that?