QR encoding

Intro For a project we had to put text in QR-codes, seemed simple enough, but sadly the printers that our customers used only supported the alphanumeric-type QR-code which has a small available character set of 45 characters (0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ $%*+-./:). But we wanted to be able to send unicode strings which require a much larger character set. So it quickly became apparent that we needed some kind of encoding. The most well-known encoding is probably Base64 however sadly this uses too many characters for our goal.