The symbol comprises the following elements:

• Leading quiet zone

• Start character

• Symbol characters that represent data

• Stop character

• Trailing quiet zone

Circular Code 93 combines some of the characteristics of Code 39 and GS1-128 into a single barcode language. As with GS1-128, each Circular Code 93 character is made up of three bars and three spaces, each of which can be single, double, triple, or quadruple thickness.

Circular Code 93 supports the full 128-character ASCII set, as is the case with GS1-128. However, Circular Code 93 employs the same 43-character base set as Code 39 and uses two-character combinations to represent the rest of the 128-character set, whereas GS1-128 represents most of the 128 characters with separate, unique characters. Therefore, GS1-128 is a more versatile and efficient barcode language than Code 93, especially when encoding numbers.

Circular Code 93 contains two check digits that appear immediately before the stop character. They are based on the modulo 47 (mod 47) algorithm.

The recommended minimum symbol height for manual scanning is 5.0 mm or 15 percent of the symbol width (excluding quiet zones), whichever is greater. The quiet zones must be at least 10X wide, where "X" is the current X dimension.