A substrate having a coding pattern disposed therein or thereon. The coding pattern comprises: a tiling of contiguous grid cells, each grid cell being demarcated by t target elements and having t-fold rotational symmetry, each grid cell containing nt control symbols, each control symbol being encoded by a set of macrodots; and a tiling of contiguous tags, each tag consisting of an array of c grid cells, each tag containing a plurality of data symbols, each data symbol being encoded by a set of macrodots. Any contiguous tag-shaped array of c grid cells contains cnt control symbols, which encode r1 registration symbols and r2 second symbols. The r1 registration symbols, taken in a defined sequence relative to a physical layout of the tag-shaped array, form a registration codeword of length r1. The r2 second symbols form one or more second codewords.