Subject: [81attendees] What is it at the bottom of restaurant receipts?

From: "Worley, Dale R (Dale)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:29:46 -0400

What is the stuff at the bottom of restaurant receipts in Quebec?
The text is sensible, but there's a high-information-content
barcode as well.  Also, the bottom line is made of dingbats; it looks like
someone sorted through Unicode to find the most interesting
symbols available.  Different bills have different rows of dingbats.
In fact, it looks like the sekret code I designed when I was 12...

Dale

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From: Geoff Thompson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2011 09:36:40 -0700

Dale-
I don't know about the "dingbats" (I've never been able to decode the 
dingbats in my life)

The contents of the barcode is shown in text below the barcode.
The barcode is used to ring up your transaction when you (or your 
waiter) takes the check to the cash register.
The register scans it to recall your transaction.
It avoids having to re-key in the amount.

Geoff

On 287//11 1:29 PM, Worley, Dale R (Dale) wrote:
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From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2011 18:39:15 -0700

+1 to the query. I noticed it and thought it was weird because there was also an obviously-readable barcode.

--Paul Hoffman

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From: "John R. Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 Jul 2011 22:13:17 -0400

> +1 to the query. I noticed it and thought it was weird because there was also an obviously-readable barcode.

I thought it might be Inuktitut, but no, it really is dingbat characters.

Regards,
John Levine, [email-masked], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly

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From: Simon Perreault <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 09:57:47 -0400

On 07/28/2011 04:29 PM, Worley, Dale R (Dale) wrote:
> barcode as well.

Everything between the two ============= lines is required by the Québec 
government. This is added by boxes that restaurant owners are required 
to install by law. I don't know the technical details, but the intent is 
to prevent tax fraud by restaurant owners.

> Also, the bottom line is made of dingbats; it looks like

We are also very intrigued by this and so far haven't found an answer. 
My personal guess is that it is some kind of visual checksum that can be 
compared with one that a computer will display when you scan the bar 
code in, so as to let a human make a visual verification with easily 
recognizable characters. They would be using dingbats to increase 
entropy and thus reduce the number of characters that one would have to 
compare.

Simon
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