Hi Gerard,

If the old printer is a laser, there's a 50% chance it'll work. If the barcodes will be scanned only at your client's office or store, where you can control what scanners and printers they use, you can use whatever combination works. The important thing is that you test the barcodes to ensure that they work. This is called in the industry "internal use".

If it's for products that will be sold to other businesses that in turn will use barcode readers that are out of your control, you will have to follow certain guidelines depending on the type of barcode you choose.

If the printer is dot-matrix, forget about it. Even if it's an ink-jet, there's a good chance it will not work.

Now to the data printed...

If the barcodes represent only numeric data, you're in luck. There are barcode fonts that are quite compact and might be ideal for that (EAN, UPC, for example).

If you need numbers and letters in the barcode, it's somewhat harder, but you still have choices:

Code39: VERY VERY VERY VERY easy to use, but it's not compact, so you will need to print at rather small sizes and pray that your scanners are able to read the code. There are free fonts available all over the net.

Code128: Harder to use because it requires checksum characters and the same code can represent 3 different characters, so it's really not very straight forward to use. It's more compact than Code39. I've found only one freeware version of this font and it's supposedly under the GNU license, whatever that might mean when it comes to fonts. Otherwise, you'll have to pay about $100 - $200 per user or some ridiculous licensing fees.

Code93: This one is, I think, the most compact of the alphanumeric fonts, but it uses 2 checksums. No free versions that I know of, licensing is similar to code128 because barcode fonts come from 4 or 5 vendors only.

Have fun!

Alex




>Hi.
>Anybody got experience of printing Bar Code Labels ?
>I need to be able to print fairly small bar codes and Prices on Labels
> for the Jewelery business (to sit in a Jeweller's display Case) in a shop.
>
>The Labels will be quite small, and I am wondering can I get any old printer to print them, and also what else I need to get ?
>(Do I need to purchase/download any fonts ?)
>
>At this stage, I have to decide on a printer so would welcome any suggeations on suitable printers?
>
>regards,
>
>Gerard