Plain text QR — Verify the result

Worked example

Scan with a text-only reader and compare the decoded string with your source character by character, including accents and spaces.

Take a museum placing a short caption on a display case: "Bronze mirror, Gaya period. Please do not touch." Scan the exported chatcument-qr.png with the phone camera and with a generic scanner app. Confirm that nothing was added, nothing was dropped, and the full stops and capitals match the draft.

If the text includes accents, Korean or other non-Latin characters, read each of them. The tool encodes the string as UTF-8 bytes, but readers vary in how they decode it, so an é or a Hangul syllable showing as odd symbols on one app is a signal to test more apps rather than a reason to change the text.

Look for accidental behaviour. A string that looks like a web address, an email address or a phone number may be offered as a link or action by some readers, while others show only text. Write the content so that either behaviour is harmless, and use the copy-content button to confirm the exact string, including trailing spaces.

Then measure the file. For a 49 x 49 code, 720 px with the 18 px border gives modules of about 14 px; in print, aim for a code at least 3.4 cm across at 0.5 mm per module, and scan the proof from reading distance and from 15 cm.

Short text, accents and line breaks

Decoded text content

The decoded text is the whole product, so a character-level comparison is the only verification that counts.