User's Manual

Table Of Contents
XPS Card Printer Installation and User Guide 76
Card Design: Magnetic Stripe
This section describes:
About Magnetic Stripe
Magnetic Stripe Formats
Magnetic Stripe Escapes
Magnetic Stripe Fonts
About Magnetic Stripe
Magnetic stripe is an option available in the printer. See the Printer
Status page of Printer Properties for the printer to see if your
printer has a magnetic stripe option. The cards you use must also
have a magnetic stripe. The magnetic stripe is a brown or black
stripe close to one long edge of the card.
See the package containing new cards for details about the
magnetic stripe.
The magnetic stripe option is set up to define the coercivity,
number of tracks, and data format. The coercivity and data format
are set in the printer. The installer sets these values and they
remain the same for all cards printed using the same design. See
How to Set the Magnetic Stripe Coercivity if you need to change
the coercivity.
The data format determines how many characters can be encoded on a track. It also determines
which characters can be encoded. Click
here to see the characters available with the default ISO
three-track format.
Click
here to see the characters available with the JIS single-track format.
Your cards can use the default format for each track, or can use a different combination of
tracks and data formats.
Magnetic Stripe Formats
Three-Track Option
The default data formats for a three-track magnetic stripe option are:
Track 1 IATA
Track 2 ABA
Track 3 TTS
This combination is often abbreviated IAT. This format is called ISO format.
IATA (International Air Transport Association)
The maximum number of characters for IATA format is 76 characters. These characters can
include spaces, upper case alphabetic characters, numeric characters, and the following special
characters:
! # $ % ' ( ) * + , - . / ; : < @ > = ^ ] \ [ " & _