A document is printed on a recoding medium together with a high resolution 2d barcode that encodes desired information about the document, and a low resolution 2d barcode that encode resolution data that specifies the spatial resolution of the high resolution barcode. The low resolution barcode has a sufficiently low spatial resolution so that it can be adequately read by a majority of scanners at their low resolution settings. Thus, if the printed document is scanned at a low scan resolution, the low resolution barcode can be adequately read to extract the resolution data in order to determined whether the scan resolution is adequate for reading the high resolution barcode. If necessary, the printed document can be re-scanned at a higher scan resolution so that the high resolution barcode can be adequately read. Alternatively, the resolution data may specify the print resolution at which the document is printed.