Re: barcode scanner

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The following is probably more than you ever wanted to know ;-)

upc is, by far, the most common as it occurs on virtually every product up for sale.

3of9 is also a very common "1D" code used to code number and alpha information as it and fonts to produce it are in the public domain... add a specific character to the front and end of a string of characters and yo can select the font and print it using any app such as word or excel which supports font printing.

http://www.jetmobile.com/samples/samples.htm

There are a number of other common and not so common "1D" formats and the good news is that most scanners will automatically detect and decode* any of the most popular ones.

One consideration is the physical length of the code... 3of9 is longer than upc because of the alpha characters and 128 even longer because it supports upper and lower case characters... turns out, the ccd readers often can't handle codes that are longer than 3" ...that's one reason the interleave codes are used.

Beverly Howard [MS MVP-Mobile Devices]

*Not necessarily a good thing. I wrote a warehouse barcode app long ago, and the warehouse was having program problems until the foreman heard some "beeping" back in the stacks and followed his ears until he discovered a bored worker with a scanner in one hand, a coke can in the other, repeatedly scanning the can's upc code... we immediately "turned off" the upc and other codes we were not using ;-)

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