Comments on: Use Microsoft Word as a barcode generator

By: How to generate barcodes online for free

How to generate barcodes online for free — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:43:11 +0000

[...] setting. If you don’t have software to generate barcodes, like Label Matrix, etc, then you could create your own barcodes using Microsoft Word, but it’s a bit of a [...]

By: Brian Dobson

Brian Dobson — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 23:22:37 +0000

Code 128 requires quite a lot of work to calculate the check digit. There is an add in for Word available for the above mentioned font by the producer of it (yes, that’s me) at: http://freebarcodefonts.dobsonsw.com.

The add in also encodes in Variant C, which is mentioned above, that shortens the length of digit pairs by one (10 digits encoded = a barcode length of 5 digits.)

Thanks for mentioning me on your blog.

Brian

By: ben

ben — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:46:50 +0000

Nick, you are right about the extra logic on the syntax. on code 39 for example, I needed to add asterisks before and after the text for it to be recognizable. For example *1234567890* in code 39 will give an output of 1234567890.
Also I got another tip to use Wordpad instead of Word because Word could change the spacing of the fonts and make the whole barcode unreadable for the optic reader.

By: Nick Burns

Nick Burns — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:35:18 +0000

Hi. Long time reader, first time commenter ( I think )

You’re using the font incorrectly. You can not simply type ‘1234567890′ and change it to a barcode font and expect a barcode reader to understand it. There are algorithms (freely available via a search) in play that encode the text into a proper code that can be understood by a reader. If you look at that site you linked to you’ll see there are plugins and utilities to correctly generate a barcode.

Try the online converter at the above site, you’ll see that 1234567890 actually produces š1234567890Aœ. Those characters at the beginning and ending of the number are known as start and stop characters so the reader knows how to interpret the text.

We use Smart128 here at work which does even more encoding so that a long string of characters are actually reduced to a smaller set in order for the barcode to fit on the page. Look at this page for the specification (again at the link you provided)
http://freebarcodefonts.dobson.....mation.htm

I think the easiest barcode to use is Code 39, all it requires is an asterisk before and after any text you want to convert to a barcode.

Just thought I’d chime in on this, since it took me some time to get the right algorithm for our barcodes. I felt it only right to make sure that your readers were informed about this.

By: eder.apt-get

eder.apt-get — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:26:54 +0000

Great..I din´t know that I could use Word for barcodes..