mirror 73 driven by a motor 74 from which the beams are directed out through a suitable lens system 75 to impinge upon the bar code symbol 14 as the two scan lines 13a and 13b the assembly of fig6 may be mounted in a hand held housing 30 shown in fig7 or as scanner 10 attached to stationary housing 31 in fig8 the embodiment of fig6 operates to provide improved resolution and decoding as discussed above with reference to fig2 3 and 4 as disclosed above with reference to fig1 the number of scan lines utilized in the embodiment of fig6 is not limited to the two scan lines 13a and 13b illustrated but instead may be more than two scan lines 13a 3b and 13c or as illustrated in fig9 a number of scan lines 13a 13b and 13c may be advantageously used to scan a conventional bar code symbol 14 to obtain greater resolution fault correction etc these three scan lines 13a 13b and 13c are generated by a single light source using a beam splitter and a mechanical scan mirror as in fig6 fig1 is a flow chart of the steps for scanning a bar code using the scanner shown in fig6 a light beam is generated step 100 the light beam is split using a liquid crystal device step 110 the split light beams are directed toward a bar code using a moveable.