Hi Steve,

The website pointed by Luis in his message has a link that has information on several types of barcodes.

Basically, some barcodes are used as standard in some industries (upc in retail, etc.).

The differences are mostly in the character set (code39 can represent alpha and numerical info, while upc only does numbers).

The density (how much space one takes over another).

Embedded error correction (some are straight representation of the characters being encoded, others also include check-sums, etc).

I like code39 because it's very easy for me to print labels using it (each encoded character has only one barcode, so it's just like changing fonts from arial to times except that instead of printing human-readable characters, you'll be printing characters comprised of bars).

Good luck in your quest!

Alex


>I don't know where else to post this, so here it goes.
>
>I am interested in adding bar code wand/scanner functionality to an app. The reader was already givne to me (UniTech MS210U), and it supports these types of bar codes:
>
> UPC-A
> UPC-E
> EAN-13
> EAN-8
> I 2 of 5
> S 2 of 5
> Code 39
> Codabar
> Code 93
> Code 128
> UCC/EAN128
> MSI
> Code 32
> Plessey Code
> Label Code IV,V
> China Postal Code
>
>I have only heard of "Code 39", that's the extent of my knowledge. Can anyone say why a given code would be used over another? The kind of data I want to bar code will be an int, a long, or a GUID.
>
>Thanks.