EAN/JAN-13
The European Article Numbering (EAN) system (also known as International Article Number) and the Japanese Article Numbering (JAN) system are members of the UPC barcode family that was developed in the 1970s for automatic identification of retail products. EAN-13 is used around the world for automatic identification of retail products, including in the US, where retail scanning systems have been required to read EAN-13 since 2005.
The EAN and JAN symbologies are identical, except that JAN uses a country code in the range of 490 to 499, which indicates that the manufacturer was registered in Japan.
EAN-13 is a superset of UPC-A, which means that any system that can read EAN-13 can also read UPC-A. A UPC-A symbol that is created in the United States can be transformed into an EAN-13 symbol by prefixing it with a zero.
EAN-13 is defined in ISO/IEC 15420 Information technology - Automatic identification and data capture techniques - EAN/UPC bar code symbology specification. The GS1 implementation is defined in GS1 General Specifications.
The symbol comprises the following elements:
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Leading quiet zone
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Guard pattern (start character)
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Six symbol characters
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Center guard pattern (center character)
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Six symbol characters, including check digit
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Guard pattern (stop character)
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Trailing quiet zone
EAN-13 is so called because it encodes 12 digits of numeric message data and a check digit, for a total of 13 digits.
Most barcode symbologies print bars and spaces in only two widths, but with EAN, four different widths are used. This enables each numeric character to be represented by using just two bars and two spaces, which is the fewest number of modules required per character of any symbology.
Although EAN barcodes come in a number of different message lengths, these lengths are not fully variable as they are with other barcode symbologies.
Guard bars. The guard bars are the start, stop, and center characters in an EAN symbol.
The start and stop characters are identical to each other. They are made up of three modules as follows:
narrow bar
narrow space
narrow bar
The center character is made up of five modules as follows:
narrow space
narrow bar
narrow space
narrow bar
narrow space
The bars for these characters are longer than the bars that encode data, and they are sometimes referred to as security bars.
This symbology supports all numeric digits (0-9).
EAN-13 contains a check digit that is based on the modulo 10 (mod 10) algorithm.
With four available printing widths for the bars and spaces instead of just two, EAN takes about half the number of bars and spaces relative to Interleaved 2 of 5 to represent each character. However, the use of the wider bars and spaces nullifies this space savings. Interleaved 2 of 5 codes pack data more densely than EAN does.
Two-digit (EAN-2) and five-digit (EAN-5) add-on symbols (supplemental barcodes) are available for adding to the right of the EAN-13 symbol. These add-on symbols are usually used to add a date or a manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) to periodicals, books, and weighed products, such as food. The character set and density of EAN-2 and EAN-5 are the same as those of EAN-13. A human readable interpretation is always included.
The start characters for the EAN-2 and EAN-5 add-on symbols are made up of three modules as follows:
single bar
single space
double bar
The add-on symbols do not use a stop character or center character.
With EAN-13, a thirteenth character is encoded into the barcode message. The convention is for this thirteenth digit to be displayed as the leftmost digit in the barcode message, which means it is transmitted first.
The thirteenth digit is encoded by using the parity pattern of the left-hand half of the EAN symbol. A complete explanation of this parity pattern is beyond the scope of this text, but the result is that even though EAN-13 has the same number of bars and spaces as UPC-A, the EAN-13 barcode message contains 13 characters, as contrasted with the 12 digits of UPC-A.
Because many purchased goods are conveniently prelabeled with EAN barcodes, you will want a barcode reader that can read these symbologies. These barcodes are usually produced photographically or with a laser printer. However, since most barcode readers can automatically discriminate between the various barcode symbologies, it is very easy to combine different barcode symbologies in a given application environment.
If you have a barcode reader that has automatic discrimination, we recommend using either Interleaved 2 of 5 or Code 39 for your in-house printed barcodes. Because EAN is a numeric-only code, Interleaved 2 of 5 would be the preferred substitute, because it uses about half the space that Code 39 uses.
Symbol Structure