johnl@ima.UUCP (03/22/87)
My sister is working up a PC-based system to help a small local book store
keep track of its inventory and sales. It would be easier to keep the data
base in sync with reality if she could easily print stickers that they put on
the book when it's put on the shelf and read at the cash register when somebody
buys it.
The obvious way to encode the stickers is with some sort of bar code. I have
been looking at what's available, and all I can find is ads in the back of
magazines offering readers for about $500. I can't tell whether they give
you bar code printing software (or reading software for that matter). What
I really want to know is 1) how are bar codes encoded, 2) how hard is it to
print them, and can you reliably do it on a generic graphics printer, and
3) what sort of data stream comes back from the reader and how hard is it to
turn that data stream back into the coded number.
Any advice or references would be appreiciated. (I'd say thanks in advance,
but people might make fun of me.)
--
John R. Levine, Javelin Software Corp., Cambridge MA +1 617 494 1400
{ ihnp4 | decvax | cbosgd | harvard | yale }!ima!johnl, Levine@YALE.something
Where is Richard Nixon now that we need him?spellman@hplchm.UUCP (03/23/87)
Hewlett Packard makes quite a few barf-code readers and printers. I have used a wand on a vectra( HP's AT compatible) which ascified the bar code making input as easy as from the keyboard. A lot of HP printers will print bar-code. The laserjet makes really nice ones. A look at The HP catalog would probably be worth your while. A little trivia: Did you know ... bar code was invented many moons ago originally for keeping track of railroad cars. They needed a self clocking easy to mechanically read encoding method and came up with bar-code. Miles Spellman
burton@parcvax.UUCP (03/25/87)
Yes, and after several years of use, the railroads abandoned their version of bar codes, called ACI, for Automatic Car Identification. It just wasn't practical to keep all those labels clean enough. Phil Burton Xerox Corp.