← ScannerBench workbench

SCANNERBENCH FIELD GUIDE

Start with what arrived.

A keyboard scanner behaves like a keyboard. ScannerBench observes text and events in its capture box; it cannot identify the physical device or reconstruct its original bytes.

Your first check

  1. Choose Enter, Tab, manual finish or an idle timeout to complete each capture. Start with the suffix your scanner normally sends.
  2. Select Start capture, then scan a known barcode with focus in the box. Each completed scan leaves capture armed for another value.
  3. Inspect the escaped value and character list. Leading zeroes and spaces are retained.
  4. Enter the known encoded value in Compare. An exact mismatch stays visible even if a comparison rule produces a match.
  5. Review a report before downloading it. Sharing a downloaded file is a separate action.

Try an example to explore without hardware. Examples are explicitly synthetic and never count as device evidence.

Nothing appears, or the scan never completes

Check focus and connection. Confirm the scanner can type in an ordinary text editor and is in keyboard mode. Serial/API scanners are outside this tool’s capture interface. Use Finish scan if no suffix is sent. Enter and Tab are keyboard observations; they are not automatically CR or LF characters in the text.

Only an unmodified Enter or Tab triggers the chosen completion rule. Escape stops capture. When Tab is the terminator, press Escape before tabbing through other controls. Moving to another field preserves partial input as incomplete. Returning focus does not rearm capture.

Wrong letters or punctuation

First check the known encoded value. Differences can arise from keyboard-country settings, host layout, input methods or upstream software. Choose the scanner model, connection and OS to see applicable manufacturer references. The initial reviewed catalogue covers Zebra DS2208 and DS4608 in USB keyboard mode; unknown models still get capture and general checks. Model selection does not detect or configure hardware.

Extra spaces, prefixes and suffixes

Inspect the first differing code point. Optional rules can remove a literal prefix/suffix, trim outer ASCII spaces or convert CRLF to LF. They apply only to the selected observed text, in the displayed order. They never modify the stored capture. No guessed correction is applied.

Group separators, paste and Unicode

The inspector names received U+001D as GS. A Ctrl+] key event alone does not prove that a GS character reached the field. Literal backslash-u text is different from an actual control character. GS1 interpretation is a later feature.

Browser textareas normalize line endings. On paste, ScannerBench retains available paste-event text separately from the field value; choose the observation to inspect and compare. Imported expectations retain their strings, including CRLF. Code points and UTF-16 units are counted separately. Composition suppresses completion until committed; interruption is incomplete.

Timing, edits and limits

Capture span includes waiting time and is not optical scan speed. The event log is ordered browser delivery evidence, not a physical scan boundary detector. Idle completion is a segmentation heuristic that can split slow input. Edited captures are labelled.

A session holds up to 50 captures and 100,000 events. A capture allows 4,096 code points, 16,384 UTF-16 units and 16,384 events. Capacity failures stop visibly and mark retained partial data incomplete. Clear or export before starting again.

Shared test files

Import a smartfact.bench-test/v1 JSON file, review its self-declared issuer and fixture, then select an expected value. Import does not arm capture or apply settings. Download the shared example. It supplies expected text, not a physical test label.

What has been tested?

Automated tests exercise Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, including keyboard input, focus, comparison, imports and exports. Automation is not scanner qualification. No physical scanner/OS/browser combination has yet been qualified for this alpha. Actual Windows browsers, installed Safari, OS input methods and mobile scanner integrations need separate checks. Mobile layout supports manual and paste inspection.

References