CueCat: Creating Barcodes

From WikiThing

[edit] Creating Barcodes for the :CueCat

The barcodes below are created in Microsoft Word using the ‘Free 3 of 9 Barcode’ font from Matthew Welch at http://www.squaregear.net/fonts/ (NB there is another free font on the web called ‘3 of 9 Barcode’ that did not work so well.) By experiment I found that I can print good readable barcodes on my LaserJet if I do the following:

a) Turn off the automatic bold setting in Word – go to Tools | AutoCorrect Options . . . | AutoFormat and uncheck ‘[ ] *bold* and _italic_ with real formatting’

b) Put an * at each end of the text to be coded. Note: the standard font only includes upper case characters. I have used the Extended font on this page and for some unknown reason the :CueCat reverses the upper and lower case letters i.e. ‘E’ comes out as ‘e’ and vice versa.

c) Put several spaces after the final asterisk to make sure that there is clear space for the scanner to start in (and before the first asterisk if necessary)

d) Set the size of your font to about 36 point.

e) Set the font colour of the spaces and paragraph marker after your barcode to white, otherwise they may show up in the barcode and make it impossible to read. If you have problems look at your code and make sure that it starts and ends with the asterisk character (see below). Anything else makes the code unreadable.

f) Make sure that there is vertical white space between barcodes. If they are too close the scanner may overlap and get confused.

You can also easily produce personal barcodes using on-line barcode creators and copying and pasting the resulting image see e.g. http://www.barcodemill.com/ or http://www.tec-it.com/playground

Note: these Code 39 barcodes are not the same as UPC or ISBN codes which use a different font coding and are only numeric. See [1] for more information on Code 39 barcodes.

Category: CueCat

CueCat: Creating Barcodes

From WikiThing

[edit] Creating Barcodes for the :CueCat

[edit] See also