News — 1D Barcode

1D barcodes are commonly used in the following industries - retail markets, automotive, manufacturing, warehousing, shipping and military industries as well as in healthcare and blood banks.

X-Dimension is the width of the narrowest element (bar or space) in a barcode. It is measured in thousands of an inch call mils - 1000 mils is 1 inch. 5 mils means 5 thousandths of an inch. Here you can see two barcodes - on the left a 1D barcode with x-dimension of 10 mils and on the right a 2D barcode with x-dimension of 5 mils. Different scanners are able to read codes with different x-dimensions.

Barcodes consist of bar and space elements. These bar and space elements can vary in width proportional to the narrowest element in the barcode. The difference between the wide and narrow elements is called bar width ratio. You can have up to 4 different bar width ratios in a single barcode, like with the Symbology Code 128.

Check digits verify that the embedded barcode data is decoded correctly by the host system. The check digit is calculated from all the data characters in the barcode. Not all symbologies have a check digit - e.g. D2 of 5 doesn't Some symbologies give the option to include a check digit or not - e.g. Code 39 In some symbologies the check digit is automatically embedded in the barcode - e.g. UPC A

To understand ADC technology you have to understand what symbology is. Symbology is a method of representing data characters using barcodes. We distinguish different types of symbologies and each symbology has a unique way of encoding data characters. To read barcodes we use scanners. Two main symbology types are 1D and 2D. 1D Barcode Symbology Example Code 3 of 9 Each data character is represented by 9 elements - wide (W) and narrow (N) bars and spaces 3 out of 9 characters must be wide   2D Barcode Symbology Example PDF417 PDF417 is 2D symbology is where data is encoded...