Bar Code Generation and reading

[Peter Alcibiades]

Thanks very much for the replies.  

After trying some of this, and after some help from the kbarcode author, it 
seems to be down to how I was saving copying and printing.

Maybe this will be useful to someone else struggling with this stuff.

Kbarcode is a wonderful tool - it generates codes of all kinds, puts in the 
prefixes and suffixes, does the checksums where the code requires, does label 
layout and printing for every kind of label format there is.  It also will 
either print directly, or let you save in lots of graphics formats.  So it 
should do the prefix stuff you describe.

What I had done was save in pbm (and one or two others) format.  I then 
imported into OpenOffice, using the presentation package, for layout.  To get 
it laid out properly I resized the graphics.  They didn't work.  However, 
printing directly from kbarcode turned out to work, and after enough 
experimentation, once or twice, one or two of the pbms printed from OO worked 
if I tried often enough from enough angles.

It seems that doing all this, though it results in visually perfectly 
acceptable codes, somehow loses resolution.  So there are two possible ways 
of doing it.  The first way is to do your resizing in kbarcode, and then 
print either directly from kbarcode, or else import the code into the OO 
presentation package but not change it at all while doing so.

The second way, which the developer suggested as an alternative (very helpful 
guy by the way), would be, generate a really huge version of the code, and 
then downsize it.  I haven't tried this since the first alternative seems to 
work.

The thing that is still deeply puzzling is the question of barcode fonts.  
Maybe this relates to your comments?   I have a few free ttf ones, all code 
39.  One from ID Automation. I downloaded them, and they display on the 
desktop or font viewer like any other font, showing icons for bar codes, or 
showing all the different sizes in the viewer.  I imported them into OO.  
They appear in the font list and you can type in your code, put in the prefix 
and suffixes as you guys instructed, select it, and then apply the font, just 
as if they were Times New Roman or whatever.  Nothing happens!  It still says 
(eg) *1234*, though when you select it, OO is telling me that it is indeed a 
bar code font.  I did print preview, just in case, and it still shows *1234* 
in what looks like my standard font.  I printed to a pdf, same thing.  Also, 
in the font selection menu, all other fonts show up with representations of 
how they are going to look, whereas the bar code fonts don't.

So how, if you have a real barcode font, do you get to use it???  There must 
be a childishly simple answer to this one.....

Peter