ISO International Standard

Manufacturers of bar code equipment and users of bar code technology require publicly available standard symbology specifications to which they can refer when developing equipment and software.

ISO/IEC 15420:2009 specifies the requirements for the bar code symbology known as EAN/UPC. It specifies EAN/UPC symbology characteristics, data character encodation, dimensions, tolerances, decoding algorithms and parameters to be defined by applications. It specifies the Symbology Identifier prefix strings for EAN/UPC symbols.

Data content and the rules governing the use of this symbology are outside the scope of ISO/IEC 15420:2009; they are defined in the GS1 General Specifications.