Create a phone call QR code

The plainest of the contact formats, a phone code carries nothing but a tel link and the number inside it. A phone reads the code, shows the number and offers to call. Some handsets dial as soon as the button is pressed and others drop the digits into the keypad first, but either way nobody is standing in the rain copying eleven digits off a sign into a phone held in the other hand.

How to fill it in

• Start with a plus and the country code if anyone scanning might be abroad, since a local format fails from outside the country.
• Paste the number in whatever shape you keep it. Spaces are stripped automatically.
• An extension can follow after a comma, though whether the handset dials it once connected varies by phone.
• Use the line you want answered, not the personal mobile you will regret putting on a thousand flyers.
• Scan the finished code and read back the number that appears before it goes to print.

Where these are useful

To let boards and agent signs, read from the far side of a street. Taxi ranks and minicab windows. Out of hours notices on a locked door, pointing at whoever is on call. Service labels on lifts and machinery. Delivery instructions on a gate, so the driver rings instead of leaving a card. The pattern in all of them is the same: the number has to be usable at a distance, in poor light, or by somebody with one hand full of shopping.

The number never leaves this tab. It is formatted into a tel link and rendered as a code by script running in your browser, and there is no upload step anywhere in that process for it to leak through.