Creating Barcodes with an Appropriate Symbology and Font
The uses of barcodes within industry, and elsewhere, now cover a host of different processes. Common examples include stock control in warehouses, asset tracking, document management, retail point of sale transactions, labelling medical supplies and shop floor data capture, to name but a few. This wide variety of applications means that an equally wide range of technologies can now be used to generate, print and read barcodes. Any company looking to utilise barcoding needs to select the right solution to make the most of the investment in technology.
The essential starting point for implementing barcodes is to ask why they are being deployed and who will need to read them. This may be different for separate barcoding projects within the same organisation. For instance, pallet locations in a warehouse may only need to be read by internal pickers, while barcodes on product packages will need to be read by scanners in shops.
As barcoding has become more commonplace, a number of different industry standards, or symbologies, have emerged. If you are required to create a barcode that someone else has to read then you will need to check if there is an industry standard. These symbologies state what information is required and how it should be stored on the barcode and examples of industry symbologies include:-
- EAN (International Article Numbering Association) in retail
- EIA (Electronics Industry Alliance) in electronics
- HIBCC (Health Industry Business Communication Council) in healthcare
- Hazmat for the chemicals sector
- AIAG (Automotive Industry Action Group) in the automotive industry
Other differences in symbologies include whether or not they are numeric or alphanumeric and whether they can support both upper and lower case letters or just one of these. Even if you are only choosing barcoding for internal use it is vital to ensure you have access to all the numbers, characters and other symbols you might need.
Having chosen an appropriate symbology you will also need software that can create barcodes and an appropriate font for printing. When selecting barcode software and fonts it is important to ensure the licensing covers all users and the most cost effective licensing model is usually by way of a site licence without having to pay for each and every workstation.