Barcodes and printers
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I'm going to need to find a decent barcode generating control I can use in my application and a robust bar code printer. Does anybody have any suggestions? We have a Brother P-Touch printer which is a piece of junk and ideally we'd like to have a barcode printer that can be shared by many users (well, actually maybe a dozen tops) so we can sit it next to our instrument and people will be able to print the barcodes they need from their desktop (from my application). The control just needs to be flexible, robust and not overpriced. Cheers.
This free font worked fine for me: http://www.squaregear.net/fonts/free3of9.shtml[^] Janne It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. A[man], seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. — business! - I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business. Henry David Thoreau
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I'm going to need to find a decent barcode generating control I can use in my application and a robust bar code printer. Does anybody have any suggestions? We have a Brother P-Touch printer which is a piece of junk and ideally we'd like to have a barcode printer that can be shared by many users (well, actually maybe a dozen tops) so we can sit it next to our instrument and people will be able to print the barcodes they need from their desktop (from my application). The control just needs to be flexible, robust and not overpriced. Cheers.
The quality of the resulting bar code depends on several things: the printing technology, the quality of the font at different sizes, printer resolution, and the paper. Laser printing works best, since you have consistent dot sizes and placement. Ink jet can work, but it's a lot fussier when it comes to paper. Bar codes are meant to be generated at certain sizes. The best fonts will be 'tuned' to produce good results at those sizes. Printing a bar code too small will cause it to fail. You end up with artifacts due to the proportion of the printer's resolution and the bar widths and spacing. With TrueType bar codes, you find some of them tuned for specific technologies. There'll be different versions for ink jet and laser. With laser, for example, they'll shrink the bars by 0.3% or so. With ink jet, they'll shrink the bars quite a bit more, since the ink 'spreads'.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
I'm going to need to find a decent barcode generating control I can use in my application and a robust bar code printer. Does anybody have any suggestions? We have a Brother P-Touch printer which is a piece of junk and ideally we'd like to have a barcode printer that can be shared by many users (well, actually maybe a dozen tops) so we can sit it next to our instrument and people will be able to print the barcodes they need from their desktop (from my application). The control just needs to be flexible, robust and not overpriced. Cheers.
Bar codes are not as mysterious as they sound. Bar code printers work on a simple principle. You send it normal ASCII text and it prints out bar codes. Bar code readers do the same. They scan the bar code and convert them to ASCII. The output of the bar code scanner is indistinguishable from the output of a keyboard. In fact, bar code scanners -- just like credit card scanners -- are connected to a port on the keyboard (when available) -- so that the processor doesn't know or doesn't care where the input came from. On the other hand, if you want to pay for a bar code control, you can send me $500. That would be far cheaper than the $20,000 - $50,000 that ERP companies charge for "enabling" their sodtware with bar code technology! You are welcome. :rose:
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charlieg wrote:
It's pretty straightforward, but you're not saying much about your application. Are you creating barcodes on the fly?
Yes, barcodes will be generated on the fly, printed and stuck on a beaker. Somebody else just sent me a link to Zebra, I'll be sure to check them out.
I second the choice of Zebras. The company which I work for, sells them, mainly because they rock. Be sure to get the Seagull Scientific drivers[^], should you get one. Crystal Reports, or any other form/report generator tool works well with these printers. Should you want to write an application which interfaces with the printer directly, you have the option of using one of their printer languages EPL or ZPL. ZPL, a more powerful language, is only available on the Z-models (AFAIK), and is slightly more expensive. The Zebras have a great advantage over using ordinary TTF-fonts, and that is automatic generation of checksums (EAN/UPC), and subset symbology optimization (Code 128 for instance). With TTF fonts you'd have to calculate these yourself, which may be cumbersome in your application. With the Zebras, all you have to do is to define a device font in the driver options, and then use that font in any printer aware app in windows. The driver also gives you the option of changing the barcodes' various properties (density, human readable text, etc), which fonts typically won't give you. (You'd have to have a font for each configuration - quite clumbsy as you can imagine). I've seen Zebras perform very well on all kinds of sticker sizes, ranging from 3"x3" to 1"x0.4". It's definately worth it. (And I'm not saying this because I sell them. I'm selling them because they're the only ones worth selling ;))
-- 100% natural. No superstitious additives.
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The quality of the resulting bar code depends on several things: the printing technology, the quality of the font at different sizes, printer resolution, and the paper. Laser printing works best, since you have consistent dot sizes and placement. Ink jet can work, but it's a lot fussier when it comes to paper. Bar codes are meant to be generated at certain sizes. The best fonts will be 'tuned' to produce good results at those sizes. Printing a bar code too small will cause it to fail. You end up with artifacts due to the proportion of the printer's resolution and the bar widths and spacing. With TrueType bar codes, you find some of them tuned for specific technologies. There'll be different versions for ink jet and laser. With laser, for example, they'll shrink the bars by 0.3% or so. With ink jet, they'll shrink the bars quite a bit more, since the ink 'spreads'.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
printer resolution
That doesn't really come into play, until you start printing reaaaally tiny barcodes. I don't know of any printer worth any significant amount of money, which doesn't print at 300dpi or higher. The biggest problem are CCD scanners. They will typically only scan once every leap year during a moon eclipse. Laser scanners is the m4nur3! ;) Freaky barcode trivia: did you know that UPC-A barcodes are the mark of the devil? There are deeply devout christians who believe in the book of revelations, and that "near the end, you will not be able to purchase anything which doesn't carry the mark of the devil." If you look closely on an UPC-A barcode, you have three dividers. One at the start, middle and the end of the barcode. The divider is a thin black, thin white, thin black combo. If you look at how the 6 is represented on the left side of the middle marker, it's a thin black, thin white, thin black. What do you get? 6 ... 6 ... 6 - the mark of the devil. UPC-A barcodes are on pretty much everything sold in the US, if I'm not mistaken. The rapture is close!!! :-D
-- 100% natural. No superstitious additives.
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Bar codes are not as mysterious as they sound. Bar code printers work on a simple principle. You send it normal ASCII text and it prints out bar codes. Bar code readers do the same. They scan the bar code and convert them to ASCII. The output of the bar code scanner is indistinguishable from the output of a keyboard. In fact, bar code scanners -- just like credit card scanners -- are connected to a port on the keyboard (when available) -- so that the processor doesn't know or doesn't care where the input came from. On the other hand, if you want to pay for a bar code control, you can send me $500. That would be far cheaper than the $20,000 - $50,000 that ERP companies charge for "enabling" their sodtware with bar code technology! You are welcome. :rose:
Vivic wrote:
Bar code printers work on a simple principle. You send it normal ASCII text and it prints out bar codes.
That depends on the technology you're using. If you are printing them using a TTF-font, yeah, then it doesn't differ anything from printing out ordinary text. But, if you're printing barcodes using EPL or ZPL (two languages used by Zebra, and possibly other barcode printers - I think EPL is), then you'll have to tell it what's text, and what's barcode (and furthermore, what kind of barcode it is, along with the symbology's different options).
Vivic wrote:
$20,000 - $50,000 that ERP companies charge for "enabling" their sodtware with bar code technology!
Paying that much is being ripped off. Really. The software industry is really wacko in some areas. :~
-- 100% natural. No superstitious additives.
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I've seen barcode fonts being sold. How well do they work? Do they print okay at different sizes?
As far as I know it works on most printers, a few mm difference caused by using a different printer shouldn't affect the reading, i don't think the barcode scanner measures the thickness of each line but rather the thickness of each line relative to the barcode's size and the amount of characters. This enables barcodes to be printed at different sizes. you can't forget something you never knew...
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I'm going to need to find a decent barcode generating control I can use in my application and a robust bar code printer. Does anybody have any suggestions? We have a Brother P-Touch printer which is a piece of junk and ideally we'd like to have a barcode printer that can be shared by many users (well, actually maybe a dozen tops) so we can sit it next to our instrument and people will be able to print the barcodes they need from their desktop (from my application). The control just needs to be flexible, robust and not overpriced. Cheers.
Thanks to everybody for your input. I think I'll suggest to my boss that we should buy a Zebra printer and then I'll see where I go from there. We still need to get the people who are making the hardware than will scan the barcodes what format they are using :doh:
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
printer resolution
That doesn't really come into play, until you start printing reaaaally tiny barcodes. I don't know of any printer worth any significant amount of money, which doesn't print at 300dpi or higher. The biggest problem are CCD scanners. They will typically only scan once every leap year during a moon eclipse. Laser scanners is the m4nur3! ;) Freaky barcode trivia: did you know that UPC-A barcodes are the mark of the devil? There are deeply devout christians who believe in the book of revelations, and that "near the end, you will not be able to purchase anything which doesn't carry the mark of the devil." If you look closely on an UPC-A barcode, you have three dividers. One at the start, middle and the end of the barcode. The divider is a thin black, thin white, thin black combo. If you look at how the 6 is represented on the left side of the middle marker, it's a thin black, thin white, thin black. What do you get? 6 ... 6 ... 6 - the mark of the devil. UPC-A barcodes are on pretty much everything sold in the US, if I'm not mistaken. The rapture is close!!! :-D
-- 100% natural. No superstitious additives.
Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote:
I don't know of any printer worth any significant amount of money, which doesn't print at 300dpi or higher
I work for a company that makes high-speed ink jet printers. About 10 years ago, I worked on our low-end product line, which printed at 120 dpi. Getting that thing to print decent bar codes was a bitch. We ended up with hand-tuned bitmap fonts for everything.
Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote:
UPC-A barcodes are the mark of the devil
:rolleyes: If I had to pick a bar code symbology that was the spawn of Satan, it would be a tie between Interleaved 2 of 5 and U.S. POSTNET. Interleaved 2 of 5 is a PITA to generate data for. POSTNET is the dumbest bar code ever invented; no built-in error resistance, placement dependent, picky sizing, and so on.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote:
I don't know of any printer worth any significant amount of money, which doesn't print at 300dpi or higher
I work for a company that makes high-speed ink jet printers. About 10 years ago, I worked on our low-end product line, which printed at 120 dpi. Getting that thing to print decent bar codes was a bitch. We ended up with hand-tuned bitmap fonts for everything.
Jörgen Sigvardsson wrote:
UPC-A barcodes are the mark of the devil
:rolleyes: If I had to pick a bar code symbology that was the spawn of Satan, it would be a tie between Interleaved 2 of 5 and U.S. POSTNET. Interleaved 2 of 5 is a PITA to generate data for. POSTNET is the dumbest bar code ever invented; no built-in error resistance, placement dependent, picky sizing, and so on.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
which printed at 120 dpi
Ah.. But you got it to work in the end. That's well done, considering that 120 dpi is slightly better than tetris blocks on a 21" monitor. :-D
Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
Interleaved 2 of 5 and U.S. POSTNET
I've never had to generate either of them, so I'll just have to take your word for it. Why is POSTNET still around, if it's such an ass of a barcode? :~ What's up with the 2 of 5 by the way? I thought it was a simple numeric symbology, with a checksum.
-- 100% natural. No superstitious additives.
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
which printed at 120 dpi
Ah.. But you got it to work in the end. That's well done, considering that 120 dpi is slightly better than tetris blocks on a 21" monitor. :-D
Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
Interleaved 2 of 5 and U.S. POSTNET
I've never had to generate either of them, so I'll just have to take your word for it. Why is POSTNET still around, if it's such an ass of a barcode? :~ What's up with the 2 of 5 by the way? I thought it was a simple numeric symbology, with a checksum.
-- 100% natural. No superstitious additives.
The U.S. Postal Service used POSTNET for encoding the ZIP+4 code on mail. Their automated sorting equipment uses it for routing pieces of mail. IIRC, the thing with 2 of 5 is each symbol in a bar code represents a pair of numeric digits. If you have a number with an odd numer of digits, you have to handle that situation differently. I worked on a couple of projects where a customer insisted that we use 2 of 5 and encode their data. It was really awkard.
Software Zen:
delete this;