Government & Identity
IDs, licenses, and official documents. Choose a format below to generate one for free — no sign-up required.
Government & Identity formats
About government & identity
This category covers the identity documents you already carry. The barcode on the back of a driver's licence in the United States and Canada is a PDF417 symbol holding the whole record printed on the front — name, address, date of birth, licence class, issue and expiry — so a reader can capture it in one scan instead of transcribing it.
PDF417 is a stacked format: rows of short linear barcodes read together, which is how it holds well over a kilobyte in a rectangle that fits on a card. It carries substantial error correction, so a scratched or partly worn card still reads, and the amount of that correction is a choice made when the symbol is generated.
What the symbol contains on an official document is set by the issuing authority's own specification, not by the barcode format. Generating a PDF417 here produces a genuine symbol containing exactly the data you type — useful for tickets, forms, shipping documents and internal records that need a lot of data in a small space.
Government & Identity — frequently asked questions
A structured text record duplicating what is printed on the card, following the issuing authority's specification. It is data, not a key to a database — which is why a reader can display it without any network connection.