Many people mistakenly believe that a barcode can be made easily by formatting the data encoded with the barcode font. Unfortunately, that only yields an un-readable barcode. There are a couple of reasons:
To tell the scanner where the barcode starts and ends, most of barcode formats require a start character and an end character.
Some barcode formats require one or two checksum characters. The checksum character is to ensure data integrity.
Compact barcode formats, such as Code 128, UPC-A and Interleaved 2 of 5, have very special encoding. In short, the same digit may have several encoding patterns.
The simplest barcode format is Code 39 (Code 3 of 9).
All you need is to add two asterisks - one at the beginning, another one
at the end of the data.
For example, to encode 123-ABC you just need to
enter *123-ABC* and format the latter with
Morovia Code 39 fonts. Other cases may be more complicated
[2].
[2] Please note that the character mapping in this package is different than the other ones from Morovia. This ensures the maximum compatibility with your legacy application. The Morovia Font Tools source code package is designed to work with Morovia Fontware product series.