Barcode Education

Most users are already familiar with True Type fonts. A few of the common ones are Times Roman, Courier, Arial, etc. Bar code fonts are now readily available with most of the common symbologies supported. These bar code fonts can be incorporated into nearly all Windows applications simply by changing the font selection. With most bar code symbologies, a translation has to be performed by a software utility since there is not always a one-to-one correlation between a bar code symbology character and alphanumeric digit. Secondly, a bar code font utility isolates the user from having to know the technical specifications about a particular bar code (e.g. check digit calculation) and allows the user to be more productive. The specifications for each bar code symbology are available through several trade organizations, but are usually not needed for the typical end user. As an example, the Interleaved 2 of 5 symbology characters are in pairs (00,01,02,03, etc.). Simply changing the font or mapping (00) into a single, bar code character is not possible without some type of translation. This is performed by a font utility. As another example, the Extended Code 39 symbology uses a "+" character before a capital letter ("+A") to represent a lower case letter ("a"). This character sequence is not intuitive without some prior knowledge of the Code 39 specification. A font utility also performs this operation automatically.

To display "1234" in a Code 39 bar code, "1234" was simply selected and changed to a Code 39 font