Anyone get barcodes to print/scan on a Mac?

Sarah Reichelt sarah.reichelt at gmail.com
Sun Sep 16 01:12:32 EDT 2007


On 9/16/07, rgould8 at aol.com <rgould8 at aol.com> wrote:
> I've been scouring the web looking for a good barcode font that will work with my barcode scanner (an "intelliscanner", which reads standard Code 128 barcodes).?
>
> The trouble I'm finding is that the barcode font I am using works great in Windows, but the Mac version of it won't seem to display the first and last characters of the formula when printing, so it never scans.

I use a Code 128 font from Riversedge <http://www.riversedge.com/> but
it is about 10 years since I bought it so I can't tell if it is still
the same. I bought it for OS 9, but it works fine in OS X.

>
> I found a great Rev. stack to demo barcode printing in the Rev archives, and I noticed the formula for Code 128 barcodes puts a "numtochar(103+32) at the beginning and numtochar(106+32) at the end.? On my Mac, these special characters do not display anything in the barcode field.? In Windows, I get the proper barcode chars to display at the beginning and end of the string.? Not sure why.? I'm trying to determine if it's the barcode font itself (In theory, it's the same between Mac and Windows), OR perhaps something different in the way the Mac handles numtochar(103+32).? Any advice is greatly appreciated.

I think that might be my script, or if not, I use the same logic and
only on Macs, never tried it on Windows. The Code 128 scheme uses a
special header character, then the data, a checksum and a special
footer. If you display it in a normal font, you will get some strange
accented characters at the beginning & end - this is correct. Then you
should see a consistent pattern at the start & end of each barcode
when you display it using the barcode font.

There are some differences between Mac & Windows characters I think. I
wonder would using the MactoISO or ISOtoMac functions make any
difference? It may be that these codes produce the right barcode on a
real Mac font, but when using a Windows font on a Mac, things get
mixed up.

I'm not sure this is much help, but I can assure you that barcode
printing & scanning does work on a Mac.

Cheers,
Sarah



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