Editorial policy

On this page
  1. Who writes it
  2. What we will not publish
  3. How technical claims are sourced
  4. How we check what we publish
  5. Corrections
  6. Review dates
  7. Advertising

This page states how content on QRBarcodeTools is written, checked and corrected, so you can judge it rather than trust it.

Who writes it

Guides and tool documentation are written by the people who build the tools, published as the QRBarcodeTools Editorial Team. We do not attach individual bylines, and we make no claim to professional certification, industry accreditation or expert review — there is no external review panel, and saying otherwise would be inventing a credential.

What stands in for that is checkability. Every technical claim names the specification it comes from, and every calculation can be reproduced with a tool on this site.

What we will not publish

  • Invented credentials, reviews or testimonials. There are no user counts, star ratings, "trusted by" logos or quotes on this site, because we have none we could evidence.
  • Usage statistics we have not measured. No "10 million codes generated" counters.
  • Copied or reworded content. Specifications are read and summarised in our own words, with the source named so you can go and read it.
  • Pages that exist only to catch a search query. A page ships when it answers a question a person using these tools actually has. Where a topic is better handled as a section of an existing page, that is where it goes.
  • Affiliate links or paid placements. No tool, vendor or standards body mentioned here pays for the mention.

How technical claims are sourced

Standards are cited by name and number rather than linked to third-party copies, because most are paywalled and a copy we link to today may be gone tomorrow. The main ones behind this site:

  • ISO/IEC 18004 — QR Code symbology: encoding modes, error-correction levels, quiet zone.
  • ISO/IEC 15415 / 15416 — print-quality grading for 2-D and linear symbols. Cited to explain what our scan-reliability rating is not.
  • ISO/IEC 16022 (Data Matrix), 15438 (PDF417), 24778 (Aztec) — the 2-D symbologies and their fixed parameters.
  • GS1 General Specifications — GTIN structure, check-digit calculation, Application Identifiers, FNC1 handling, X-dimension and magnification ranges.
  • ISO 2108 (ISBN) and ISO 3297 (ISSN) — the modulo-11 checksums and the 978/979 and 977 EAN prefixes.
  • RFC 6350 (vCard 4.0) and RFC 5545 (iCalendar) — the structured formats behind the contact and event QR types.

Where a claim is a convention rather than a standard — the common 10:1 distance-to-size ratio for QR planning, for instance — it is described as a rule of thumb, not as a requirement.

How we check what we publish

  • Check-digit logic lives in one module with automated tests covering valid and invalid numbers for every symbology that has a checksum.
  • The four 2-D symbologies are verified by round trip: every symbol the site can produce is encoded, rasterised as the browser draws it, then decoded by an unrelated library (ZXing) and compared character by character against the input. A shared bug cannot make both sides agree.
  • Worked examples in guides are computed with the tool on this site, not written from memory, so the article and the calculator cannot disagree.
  • The build fails if any internal link is broken, any two pages share a title or description, or any canonical is wrong.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us at [email protected]. The process:

  1. The claim is checked against the published specification, not against another website.
  2. If it is wrong, it is corrected at the source — usually shared code or shared content, so every page using it is fixed at once.
  3. Where the error was in code, a regression test is added so it cannot silently return.
  4. The correction is listed in the changelog with its date.
  5. The page's review date is updated.

Review dates

Each guide shows when it was last reviewed. That date changes when the content changes — not on every deployment. A date that has not moved means the page has genuinely not needed to move, which is more useful than a freshness signal that means nothing.

Advertising

This site carries advertising to cover hosting. The site keeps ads off this page, the other policy pages, the error page and any page we have chosen not to index, and out of printed output. Placement inside a page is constrained in our AdSense account to keep ads out of the tool interface — not between form fields, not beside a generate, download or camera control. No advertiser has any influence over what is written here, no page recommends a product because of an ad, and nothing on the site is an affiliate link. What advertising means for cookies and consent is set out in the privacy policy.