The symbol comprises the following elements:

• Leading quiet zone

• Forward start code of 1101, which indicates the beginning of the barcode

• Encoded data

• Checksum code

• Terminating bar

• Reverse start code of 0011, which, when combined with the forward start code, is used to detect the scan direction (left-to-right or right-to-left)

• Trailing quiet zone

Each digit in an Anker Plessey symbol is encoded in four bars (or bits), and each bar is one of two widths (to represent a binary 0 or 1). This symbology supports up to 40 of these bars per inch, which is equivalent to a density of 10 hexadecimal characters per inch.

• A narrow bar (which is followed by a wide space) represents a binary 0 bit.

• A wide bar (which is followed by a narrow space) represents a binary 1 bit.

Anker Plessey requires a quiet zone that is at least 0.125 inches wide on either side.

This symbology supports the following hexadecimal characters:

• All numeric digits (0-9)

• Uppercase letters A-F

Anker Plessey uses cyclic redundancy check (CRC) for error correction. To do this, it appends a mandatory two-digit checksum code to the data and calculates the checksum by using the following polynomial:

g(x) = x⁸ + x⁷ + x⁶ + x⁵ + x³ + 1