The term "QR Code" is an abbreviation for "Quick Response Code", and is
the registered trademark of Denso Wave Inc. for one of the many
varieties of two-dimensional barcodes, otherwise known as matrix
barcodes. It was designed in 1994 for the Japanese automotive industry.
Its purpose was to track vehicles during manufacturing; it was designed
to allow high-speed component scanning. QR Codes can represent a variety
of data types, but was devised for encoding numeric, alphanumeric,
byte/binary, and kanji data.
QR Codes are used for product tracking, item identification, time
tracking, document management, and general marketing. A QR Code consists
of black squares arranged in a square grid on a white background, which
can be read by an imaging device such as a camera, and processed using
Reed-Solomon error correction until the image can be appropriately
interpreted. Under good lighting with a clear image, interpretation can
happen very quickly indeed. The encoded data is extracted from patterns
found in both horizontal and vertical components of the image.
QR Codes are used around the world to enable people to get to websites
quickly. They can also be used for advertisements. In this book the text
of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been represented in QR Codes.
This is not the first time QR Codes have been used for Alice. A project
called Books2Barcodes originated by Mike Lacher published online a
number of books encoded with QR Codes. That project presented Alice
divided into 186 QR Codes. Each of these encoded about 780 characters,
except for the last one which contained 301. In the Books2Barcodes
edition, which was released in 2011, the resolved text shows linebreaks
within paragraphs, and writes italicized words in ALL CAPITALS.
The present book divides Alice somewhat differently. Here, section
breaks occur exclusively at paragraph endings, and the placement of John
Tenniel's illustrations has also been taken into account. The 141,748
characters (including spaces) which occur in the book have been divided
into 113 QR Codes which have an average character count of 1290; the
longest QR Code contains 1683 characters (p. 30), and the shortest
contains 629 characters (p. 38).
In this edition, runs of italic text are preceded and followed by an
underscore _thus_. Each paragraph is separated from the next by a full
linespace, and tabs are used to indent lines of poetry where warranted.
In keeping with the electronically-parseable format of the text in this
book, the OCR-A font has been used for un-encoded text, as in the page
headers and footers, and the OCR-B font for the chapter titles and this
Foreword. The tag on the Hatter's hat has been rendered in QR Code, but
as QR Code is square in shape, it could not be used for the "DRINK ME"
tag. For this Braille "⠙⠗⠊⠝⠅⠀⠍⠑" has been used, as it is another
matrix-based writing system.
At the beginning of each chapter the decorative Victorian headers used
in other Evertype Alice books have been replaced by "Code 128" barcodes.
There are many good apps for modern smartphones that can parse these
codes as well as the QR codes useed for the text of the book itself.
