How to generate barcodes online for free

Posted on April 9, 2009 at 5:42 am

Has there ever been a situation where you needed a quick barcode for something? Maybe for a game at your office or for something at home? It may sound strange to some, but if you’re a technically savvy, you can use barcodes for all kinds of useful stuff.

So why would you ever want to create your own barcodes? Well, in my case, I print barcodes and use them to label all of my DVD/Blu-ray movies. Then I scan the barcodes into a program that I use to keep track of all my movies along with other information.

There are a ton of other reasons why you might want to use your own barcodes, especially in an office 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 pain.

Instead, if you don’t need a ton of barcodes, why not try an online barcode generator? You can quickly create a few barcodes online, print them, and stick them onto whatever you want.

BarcodesInc has a free tool on their website that allows you to do this. The other cool thing about this service is that it can be called via a URL to create barcodes directly on your website or documents.

Above is what the main barcode generator looks like. You first have to choose a symbology for the barcode. If you have no idea what this means, don’t worry too much as most new scanners support all the symbologies listed in the combo box by default.

Code 128 and Code 39 are two very common barcode specifications, so you can stick with the default. You can then choose whether you want it in JPEG or PNG format.

They have several styles for the barcodes, including an optional border, including the value text, stretching the text and inverting the colors.

Finally, you can choose the exact size of your barcode and the size of the lines and text. The last box is where you want to put in your value for the barcode.

There is one thing to note about the service. If you put in a large amount of text for the value, the width of the barcode will be longer, however, it may get cut off unless you change the width value also. If you can’t see all the text in the image, make sure to increase the width of the barcode.

At the bottom, you can grab the code to embed your barcode onto any web page that you like.

So if you want to create a barcode of your name and throw it up on your website for your friends to decipher, go for it! Enjoy!

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Comments

One Response to “How to generate barcodes online for free”

Peter said on : April 9th, 2009 at 11:09 am

How would I go about scanning these and keep track of them? I have a large collection of toy trucks I would like to inventory as I prepare to sell them.