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vCard: From the Versit Consortium to a Universal Standard

The vCard format wasn't invented for QR codes at all — it dates back to 1995, when the Versit Consortium, a group formed by Apple, AT&T, IBM and Siemens, designed it as a common electronic business-card format so contact details could move between different phones, address books and email clients without manual re-entry. Versit later handed the specification to the Internet Mail Consortium, which published it as an open standard, and it has since become the format nearly every phone, email client and contacts app understands when it sees a file ending in .vcf.

Three versions circulate today — 2.1, 3.0 and 4.0 — and they aren't fully interchangeable: 4.0 is the newest and technically the most capable, but a meaningful number of older scanning apps and contact importers still don't parse it correctly. Version 3.0, standardized as RFC 2426, is the version with the broadest compatibility across both iOS and Android contacts apps and QR scanners, which is why it's the version this tool encodes.

Why N: and FN: Are Both Required

A vCard always needs both an N field and an FN field, and they serve different purposes even though both describe the same name. N is the structured name — split into five semicolon-separated parts (family name; given name; additional names; honorific prefixes; honorific suffixes) — that software uses to file a contact alphabetically by surname or generate a formal greeting. FN is the formatted name — free text, exactly as it should be displayed on screen. This tool fills FN with the name you typed as-is, and splits it into family/given name for N by treating the last word as the surname, which correctly covers most Western name orders.

Every other field in the generated vCard — organization, title, phone, email, website, address — is only included if you actually filled it in; empty fields are left out of the code entirely rather than encoded as blank, which keeps the QR code smaller and easier to scan. The phone number is written as TEL;TYPE=CELL: rather than a bare TEL: line, because the vCard spec lets a contact carry several phone numbers side by side (CELL, HOME, WORK, FAX), each tagged with a TYPE parameter so the receiving app files it under the right label instead of guessing. The address field follows a similarly structured pattern of its own: a full ADR value has seven semicolon-separated components (post-office box; extended address; street; city; region; postal code; country), and since this tool only collects a single free-form address line, it places that text in the street position and leaves the other six components empty, which every vCard-reading app still parses correctly.