Overview

An ISBN symbol is really an EAN-13 with a particular prefix, 978 for the older ISBN-10 format, and others for the new ISBN-13 format.

Invoking

• For ISBN-13 the data should contain 12 or 13 digits separated appropriately by dash characters (-)
• The primary data can optionally be followed by a space then 2 or 5 digits if an addon is required
  
• The legacy ISBN-10 format data accepts 9 or 10 digits separated appropriately by dash characters (-)
• If the last digit of the primary data is not given then the ISBN checkdigit is calculated automatically
• The includetext option should normally be supplied

• The following options are also relevant to this symbology:

  • isbnfont: Font name for text above symbol
  • isbnsize: Font size for the text above symbol, in points
  • isbnpos: Position of text above symbol relative to height, in points
    

Regarding the legacy ISBN-10 format

The ISBN-10 standard was depreciated for public use after 1st January 2007. 

You can freely repurpose any old ISBN-10 data for ISBN-13, for instance 1-56592-479-7 (ISBN-10) is equivalent to 978-1-56592-479-6 (ISBN-13).

To convert any ISBN-10 to its equivalent ISBN-13, simply prefix 978- to the first 9 digits (all of the digits excluding the checksum): the data 1-56592-479-7 becomes 978-1-56592-479. BWIPP will then automatically calculate the 13th digit (check digit).

Scanning issues 

When an ISBN symbol is read by a barcode scanner that echos digits to a PC, the data string that is returned is most likely going to be the EAN-13 contents of the encoded symbol, i.e. 9781565924796, not 1-56592-479-7. Whether the scanner returns the former string or the latter they nevertheless represent the one same value despite appearing somewhat different.

Example ISBN-13

0 0 moveto (978-1-873671-00) (includetext) isbn

0 0 moveto (978-1-873671-00 54499) (includetext) isbn

Example ISBN-10 (legacy format)

0 0 moveto (1-86074-271) (includetext) isbn