Thursday 10 September 2020

Smaller barcodes (not a pitfall but a tip)

There is an increasing tendency in my environment to print barcodes in reports, especially for work orders, so that these can be scanned into machines or back into Priority.


The size of the barcode is proportional to the contents of the barcode, so it can often be that the barcode is long (the contents of the above are 200416121400001, which apparently is a program name for a CNC machine). So long in fact, that unless one takes steps, the barcode is liable to be split over two lines, which is definitely wrong! The way to overcome this in a report is to go into the 'HTML design' sub-form and enter the value W into the field 'position in cell'. I don't know why W was chosen - maybe it's short for 'Wide'.

Even so, the barcode can still be very large and here is a method that can shrink it. In order to display a barcode, one chooses the font 'Free3of9' and supposedly one has little control over the size. In order to fix this, one opens the following option: System Management > System Maintenance > Advanced Design > Font Definitions. The screen looks like this


The standard font 'Free3of9' is the selected line; in the 'size' column one can see that its size is 8, whatever that is (big!). What I did was to create a new line, call the font 'Free3of9,6' using the same font, and in the 'size' column I entered 6. This is the second line in the screen. A barcode whose font is this new fort will be 75% the size of the original. I also defined a font of size 4 but that seems too small!

Last remark about barcodes: one has to place an asterisk before and after the field to be displayed! So the barcode at the beginning was defined as STRCAT ('*', PARTSPEC.SPEC2, '*').

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