Barcode 13 Photo

The use of barcodes can be traced back as far as the 1960s when it was applied for industrial use for identifying railroad cars! In time common linear barcodes began making an appearance on grocery shelves. Nowadays you have them all over the place in all business areas making use of barcode technology. Barcodes are used to accurately identify or track something.

Different types of barcodes are used depending on several variables like standards and mandates, purpose and use, encoded data and printing and decoding methods. With several types of barcode standards for different purposes these are called symbologies. Symbology or barcode type of any kind is a standard for defining printed symbols. Also how a device like a barcode scanner can read and decode these printed symbols.

Actually barcode symbology is similar to the alphabets in a language. The given number of bars and spaces represent particular characters to define technical details of particular type of barcode. This includes width of bars, character set, encoding, and so on. Anybody using them is bound to want to know the normal capabilities of particular symbologies.

To print bar code labels you need to label formats with software that supports bar coding. For documents the application software needs to support bar coding. After the label is designed it needs to be output on a printer capable of producing bar codes and be able to support the specific symbology that is used.

Two kinds of thermal printing methods are used to print barcodes. They are the direct thermal and the thermal transfer. Both methods use thermal printhead that applies heat on surfaces being marked. Thermal transfer printing uses a heated ribbon to produce durable, long-lasting images on wide variety of materials. No ribbon is used in direct thermal printing that creates images directly on label material.

Thermal transfer printers can accept a wider variety of materials and are usually used for permanent labeling applications. Direct thermal printers are usually used to produce shipping labels, put away labels, receipts and other common print jobs. Regular laser and ink jet printers can produce bar codes but need to be set up to do so. They may not have native support for bar code symbologies and require to be upgraded with additional fonts and programming to support bar coding.

Thermal bar code printers are capable of supporting multiple symbologies. Common laser and inkjet printers and software applications may not be able to inherently print any bar codes or may not offer multiple symbologies. Printer specifications do list symbologies that are supported. Users are mainly interested in the general capabilities of a particular symbology.

Barcode printing is available with several common interfaces to allow simple integration with all kinds of host computer systems. Many people want to save on costs by printing out labels on existing laser or inkjet printer. This may be possible but can cause a lot of problems. With laser printers especially you have to print an entire sheet at a time. Thus when you need only one label you still have to run an entire sheet.

By Sunita Misra Shukla

Article Source: ezinearticles.com

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