Barcode has been widely adopted across all major industries. A conventional barcode is a machine readable symbol consisting of a series of parallel, adjacent bars and spaces. The basic barcode structure features leading and trailing quiet zones, a start character, one or more data characters, one or more check characters (optional) and a stop character.

Barcode has a long development history that spanned half a century. During the evolution process, many formats have been developed and adopted by industries. Around a dozen of them are actively used today.

The term “symbology” is the scientific name for the barcode format. Different symbologies have different characteristics, such as the encoding efficiency and character set. The character set defines what kind of data the symbology encodes. Typically there are four types of character sets: (1) numeric. Only digits can be encoded. (2) alpha-numeric. The symbology is capable of encoding numbers, letters plus several punctuations. (3) full ASCII. All characters in the ASCII set, with value between 0 and 127, can be encoded. (4) Binary. Binary character set includes all 256 characters in a 8-bit single byte character set. Most of two dimensional symbologies are capable of encoding arbitrary binary data.

Some symbologies may impose length requirements. For example, UPC-A encodes the numeric data of exact 12 digits.

Two dimensional symbologies are usually capable of encoding thousand of characters.

Barcode DLL supports the following symbologies:

You can purchase symbology standards directly from AIM Inc. The web address of AIM is http://www.aimglobal.org.