>Hey Ed,
> Thanks for the tip. Your suggestions make sense. I'm not one to reinvent the wheel. If I used a standard 3 of 9 font bar code NOW and we decide later on down the road which reader to use, it should read the old bar codes right?
>

Sure - just make sure that if you decide to standardize on 3 of 9 coding, the reader that you buy will support it, and that you size the barcoded output appropriately for the intended method of use - a bar code being processed with a wand would be sized differently than, say, the barcoding on a carton that you expect to read with a laser gun from 20'. Make sure that the barcode encoding method is capable of representing any characters you need to put in the bar coded output that you generate, too, since not all bar codes have codes for all possible ASCII or ANSI charcter set values.

3 of 9 is a good choice in most situations. (If I were wandering around the Delata quadrant, I'd rather see 7 of 9, for obvious reasons! ;-} )

You should pay attention to any standards used in the target marketplace; while 3 of 9 is a good standard for us in-house, it'd be the wrong choice for inventory destined for putting on the floor of an auto parts store, where things are expected to use UPC-style barcodes. IOW, not all barcodes are interchangable everywhere; do a little homework and settle on the right one, sized and located properly, for the use you intend to make of it.