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Barcode Symbology Reference

Code 39

Code39 is a symbology that is widely used in industrial bar code applications. It is discrete, self-checking, variable length symbology that can be printed readily by a variety of technologies.

Code 39 ASCII

Code39 supports 43 data characters but it is possible to encode all 128 ASCII characters using Code39's Full ASCII feature. This symbology is also known as Code 39 Extended.

Code 93

Code 93 is specifically designed to provide a high-density complement to Code39. The Code 93 symbols consist of a start code followed by an arbitrary length data region, followed by two check characters(the 'C' and 'K' check characters) and a stop character.

Code 128

Code 128 not only gives you the ability to encode all 128 ASCII characters, when encoding numbers only, it can actually encode them more densely than other barcodes. It is commonly used for certain shipping labels, primarily as defined by the Uniform Code Council in their UCC-128 shipping container bar coding standard. Code 128 supports three character sets and they can be summarized as follows:

• Code A: The Full ASCII set, except for the 26 lower case letters.
• Code B: The Full ASCII set, except for the 26 "control" characters.
• Code C: Double-density numeric. This character set is numeric-only, but any one character actually represents two digits. Therefore, 100 of the 102 characters in code set C are used to represent the 100 two-character combinations from 00 through 99. If the specific character set is not specified (ie you specify to just use Code128 instead of CODE128A), SmartCodeStudio will choose the most optimal character set or even use a combination of the character sets to encode your data efficiently.

Industrial 2 of 5 (Standard 2 of 5)

Standard 2 of 5 is a low-density numeric symbology that has been with us since the 1960s. It has been used in the photofinishing and warehouse sorting industries, as well as sequentially numbering airline tickets. The symbology is called "2 of 5" due to the fact that digits are encoded with 5 bars, 2 of which are always wide (and the remaining three are narrow). Standard 2 of 5 is a very simple symbology in that all encoding information is encoded in the width of the bars. The spaces in the barcode exist only to separate the bars themselves. Additionally, a bar may either be wide or narrow, a wide bar generally being 3 times as wide as a narrow bar. The exact size of the spaces is not critical, but is generally the same width as a narrow bar.

Interleaved 2 of 5

Interleaved 2 of 5 is a higher-density version of 2 of 5. While it is reasonable to support Standard 2 of 5 for legacy systems, new projects should seriously consider using Interleaved 2 of 5 rather than Standard 2 of 5.

EAN13

The European Article Numbering system (abbreviated as EAN) is a superset of U.P.C and was introduced about 1978. An EAN-13 symbol contains the same number of bars as U.P.C Version A, but encodes a 13th digit from the character set pattern of the left-hand six digits, in the same manner as the encodation of the check digit in a U.P.C Version E symbol.

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