About Software
Great Barcode Generator in a Nutshell
With the phenomenal growth in the usage of barcodes by almost every industry imaginable, the need arises for a way to create and produce barcode tags as easily and efficiently as possible, still maintaining a professional look with all the functionalities and scan ability of ordinary barcode tags. Great Barcode Generator has been designed as the answer to a growing call for a fast and efficient barcode creation and printing tool that is scalable across any industry and one that applies standard barcode fonts that are usable anywhere in the world by any industry.
Functions and Features of Great Barcode Generator
Always allowing the user to customize and make modifications to the final output of the barcode, Great Barcode Generator offers you an ideal solution for creating more than 26 of the internationally recognized barcode fonts, which include: UPC, Code 128, Code 39, EAN-13, ISBN, and many others. With a user-friendly interface that is designed to enable you print single or bulk labels and tags for personal, commercial or any other non-commercial use, Great Barcode Generator combines accuracy and attention to detail in the production of single or constant value barcodes along with barcodes that require an input of sequential values.
With this great new software that has been developed with user opinions and reviews in mind, you are able to select pre-defined label dimensions or tweak your output using what best suits the intended application. Make adjustments to the alignment, length, height, width, background color and other aesthetic or functional measurements that enhance customer and business appeal of your products still doing the job that barcodes do traditionally.
Download it today and get to use Great Barcode Generator in the demo version, giving you opportunity to test drive all the fully functional features before obtaining a license key for uninterrupted use of your own choosing. Output printed labels in the standard label versions that include: Tico, Avery, Tower, Aone, APLI among a host of others with a choice of product numbers for added details.
Still adding to the choice of user defined functionalities and customization, Great Barcode Generator gives you the option of high or low resolution for your output. A choice of image formats is presented to you to enable you save your design work or copy and export the same to a different software application to add further features through desktop publishing tools available in MS Paint, CorelDraw, Photoshop and any other application that accepts and works with these image formats.
In summary
As different industry require different barcode standards for a wide range of uses, whatever industry you belong to, be it Warehouse, Logistics, Grocery, Retail, Package Delivery, Entertainment, Transportation or Postal Services, just to mention the well-established barcode using industries, your needs have been taken into consideration in the development of Great Barcode Generator, not to mention help and support that is available within the software, online and through other means of communication that are most appropriate to you.
Uses of Barcode
International Adoption of Barcode Technology
Like most inventions and discoveries, it is difficult to predict the global uptake either in the short or the long term. Little would the inventors and the developers of this business tool have known of the desire that the world had of an item marking and identification as has come to be realized. The world has classified, re-developed, standardized and modified barcodes to suit almost every sphere of influence that modern day businesses have on our lives. The retail industry standing at the gateway of the inception of this tool, welcomed what has now become so vital that it is hard to imagine a world without barcodes.
The Need for Barcodes
It was in the United States of America that most of the work was done in the growth and expansion of barcodes, not to mention the investment in both time and resources, to create what the great device that is barcodes. We owe much to the NAFC (National Association of Food Chains) for seeing the need for an efficient checkout system to be used by grocery stores and retail outlets, including other large corporations that followed up on this great barcode idea when it was just in its budding stages. These companies include IBM, Computer Identics and RCA that saw a future in barcodes from early on.
Symbology and Functions of Barcodes
Since the birth of barcodes and barcode scanning technology in the 1970s, the industry that has benefited most is that for which it was originally created, that is, the retail industry. The need for a body to oversee and regulate barcode symbologies along with barcode usage and application arose when it became evident to the promoters of this apparatus that it was now a global phenomenon. Barcoding standards sprung up as uses and applications increased.
Barcoding symbologies representing different industry uses include:
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Code 39
Developed by Intermec Corporation, back in 1974 as a linear low density barcode was originated by Dr. David Allais and Ray Stevens. It was meant for use in non-retail industry items.
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Code 11
Also developed by Intermec, this was a code developed way back in 1977 as a high density system for use in telecommunication machinery and equipment identification usage.
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Universal Product Code (UPC)
A name given to the first barcode symbology after the need for standardizing barcode creation and usage arose, UPC barcodes are the standard that most closely represents the symbology of barcodes at the time of their introduction to the world. This is the barcode system that is most adoptable to industries that require a high volume of items to be scanned and the transmission of data through a computerized network for linking with a database of product details to enable inventory management and decision making.
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European Article Number (EAN)
Grew out of the UPC barcode standard as industries in Europe saw the usefulness of barcodes to grocery, retail and other established as well as emerging industries. Starting of as EAN-10, functionalities required in product identification to better address the needs of businesses, such as increased data and accuracy. EAN-13 was developed to allow barcodes contain not just a number identifying the product, but to also show the company that manufactured the item along with the country of origin where the barcode was registered.
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Other off-shoots of the EAN barcode standard came along to assist in the identification of smaller items that would have been difficult using the standard EAN symbology. These include EAN-2 and EAN-5, which, being a more compact and truncated form of its parent code, it contains fewer numerical digits and is used to tag items that are of a smaller dimension and therefore the barcode label required should fit on a smaller surface area. Such products include cigarettes, confectionaries, medicines, jewelry and others that when tagged with barcodes should still be able to pass in front of a barcode scanner and convey the necessary data to the checkout system.
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Code 128
This is a barcoding system that has the ability of representing all 128 ASCII characters. Created in the 1980s, it found use in the shipping and package industries for package tracking and inventory control and management.
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PLANET
Postal Alpha Numeric Encoding Technique of the United States Postal Services was developed to facilitate the encoding of data that is required in the sorting and delivery of mail around the country.
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POSTNET
Another barcoding standard meant for the US postal services, Postal Numeric Encoding Techniques, made it possible to encode Postal ZIP codes by use of different dimensions of barcodes that are scanned to transmit data to a computerized system and thus enabling mail to be sorted much faster and with great accuracy.
Forecast of Barcode Appeal to Industries Worldwide
The story doesn’t end there, the barcoding technology, being the dynamic creature that it is, has gone on to morph into the next generation of barcode symbology that goes under the names of: Matrix Code, 2D (2 Dimensional), 2nd Generation or QR (Quick Response) Codes. These have emerged to raise the bar in the functionalities as well the information storage capabilities of barcodes.