>Couple of other things I have encountered:
>
>Some of these drivers will allow you to choose an out-of-spec font. For instance CODE39 has a 1 x 3 aspect ratio, but Datamax drivers include fonts for 1 x 2 and 1 x 4. These will usually read, but a picky customer or barcode reader could create a problem.
>

Yes, but to do so, you need to select the out-of-spec driver; using an in-spec driver solves that rather neatly...

>Now the ugly part, with these drivers to work they MUST be installed and configured on the target machines. I eventually had to add code to check for the existence of these drivers before allowing the printing to function. Believe me, the output to a default driver is not pretty.
>

You can examine the set of installed fonts and printers through the Win32 API pretty easily; I can post code to do this if necessary.

>If you wish to print barcodes to a laser printer from a VFP report, then you will need one of the commercially available fonts. Again, you use it just like any Win font, but here you ARE responsible for creating the complete encoding. Most 1-D codes (CODE39, CODE128, ect...) have relatively light-duty encoding requirements so you shouldn't need the overhead of an ActiveX. Azalea barcode fonts have sample VFP code (written by a VB programmer so you will see some mistakes) that illustrates the coding required. I believe it is www.Azalea.com, memory fades at my age....
>

We use the Adobe fonts; translating the VB examples to VFP for encoding is pretty straightforward.