1D Barcodes
Several fundamental characteristics of barcodes need to be understood by users of dLSoft barcode products:
1. The thickness of bars in barcodes is important. The size of the smallest element of a barcode is known as its X unit size or X dimension and in standards this is usually specified in units of Mils (0.001 inches).
dLSoft barcode products may refuse to create a barcode image if the bar thickness within the metafile becomes too small. However, even when dLSoft barcode products creates an image you may resize it within another application so that when it is printed by the other application its lines may too small for the printer's resolution. Consequently it is essential that you check that a printed barcode is readable using an appropriate scanner or reader.
Barcodes printed by laser printer will, in general, be printed correctly, but codes printed by matrix printers must be reproduced at a large enough scale that the barcodes unit size is at least as large as the printer's pins.
Bar reduction: All dLSoft barcode products allow the thickness of bars to be reduced (for example to allow for ink spread during wet ink printing processes), but this adjustment should only be made when the knowledge of the extent of reduction required is available. Random guesses usually produce unreadable images!
2. Many barcode types may use codes only of a specific length. (e.g. EAN13 requires 13 digits in the code). Some barcode type use specific digits of the code as a checksum - so not every combination of digits can form a legal barcode. dLSoft barcode products can optionally calculate checksum digits, requiring only the other digits to be entered by the user. Furthermore most coding schemes are limited to 32 characters or less.
3. The barcode types supported in this release are shown in the barcodes table below. If you plan to use a specific barcode type you should examine the notes on that type before printing any barcode images.
4. Users should be aware that it is possible to generate barcodes of a specific type and find that normal retail scanners are unable to decode the images. This does not necessarily mean that there is anything wrong with the barcode image. Most scanners aimed at the retail market are not programmed to interpret barcode codes reserved for other (eg. military) use.
5. The Extra options. All of our products, which use the DLSBARxx barcode library, provide access to two options not detailed in the product manuals. These are the options EXTRA1 and EXTRA2, which may appears as checkboxes in dialogs, or as additional bit flags in the DLL or OCX. These options are used only for a limited number of barcodes, which have “unusual” features. The effect of these options is described under the barcode types, which use them. For all other barcode types these options may be ignored or set to 0.
Barcode types supported