What is a Bar Code?

A bar code (often seen as a single word, barcode) is the small image of lines (bars) and spaces that is affixed to retail store items, identification cards, and postal mail to identify a particular product number, person, or location. The code uses a sequence of vertical bars and spaces to represent numbers and other symbols. A bar code symbol typically consists of five parts: a quiet zone, a start character, data characters (including an optional check character), a stop character, and another quiet zone.

An early use of one type of barcode in an industrial context was sponsored by the Association of American Railroads in the late 1960s. Developed by General Telephone and Electronics (GTE) and called KarTrak ACI (Automatic Car Identification), this scheme involved placing colored stripes in various combinations on steel plates which were affixed to the sides of railroad rolling stock. Two plates were used per car, one on each side, with the arrangement of the colored stripes encoding information such as ownership, type of equipment, and identification number.[1] The plates were read by a trackside scanner, located for instance, at the entrance to a classification yard, while the car was moving past.[2] The project was abandoned after about ten years because the system proved unreliable after long-term use.

Barcodes became commercially successful when they were used to automate supermarket checkout systems, a task for which they have become almost universal. Their use has spread to many other tasks that are generically referred to as automatic identification and data capture (AIDC). The very first scanning of the now ubiquitous Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode was on a pack of Wrigley Company chewing gum in June 1974.

Types of barcodes

What size does a BarCode have to be?

Generally speaking, the larger the BarCode, the easier it is for it to be scanned, however most BarCode reading devices are able to scan images that are small enough to fit on a business card for example. This of course assumes that the quality of image is good.

BarCode File Formats

You can use the following file formats when creating a BarCode::
PNG file
JPG file
PDF file
PNG files work particularly well as they can be resized very easily, meaning that you can easily scale the QR Code depending on where you want to put it.