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Barcode String
Many people mistakenly believe that a barcode can be made easily by formatting the data encoded with the barcode font. Unfortunately, that only yields an un-readable barcode. There are a couple of reasons:
- To tell the scanner where the barcode starts and ends, most of barcode formats require a start character and an end character.
- Some barcode formats require one or two checksum characters. The checksum character is to ensure data integrity.
- Compact barcode formats, such as Code 128, UPC-A and Interleaved 2 of 5, have very special encoding. In short, the same digit may have several encoding patterns.
The simplest barcode format is Code 39 (Code 3 of 9). All you need is to add two asterisks - one at the beginning, another one at the end of the data. For example, to encode 123-ABC you just need to enter *123-ABC* and format the latter with Morovia Code 39 fonts. Other cases may be more complicated 1. |
