What barcode symbology should I use?
Are there any industry standards that your codes will have to conform to, or is an important customer insisting on a specific label format? If so, you will probably have to use whatever barcode they want. If you are marking a retail product, UPC-A is the code used in the USA and EAN-13 is used in the rest of the world. If you are shipping containers to the U.S. Government you will need to adhere to the LOGMARS specification (which uses Code 39). If the application is strictly for internal use and you can choose anything you want, do you now or will you ever need to encode letters as well as numbers? If so, Code 39 or Code 128 would be a good choice. If you need only numbers, Interleaved 2 of 5 would do the job although Code 128 tends to be more robust and just as compact for numeric data. If you have to encode a lot of data, take a look at PDF-417. If you need to squeeze a small or modest amount of data into a really small space, then DataMatrix might be a good choice. Depending on the
