[Koha] Matric Number and Barcode not Showing on Library Card

[Mark Alexander]

Excerpts from olufunmilayo favour's message of 2018-11-07 08:01:57 +0000:

> I configured my university's koha library card and it works
> perfectly for the undergraduate students whose matriculation numbers
> are in this format AAA/12345678 and varchar was selected for the type
> at PHPMyAdmin. However, using the same card layout, for the
> postgraduate students whose matriculation numbers are in the format
> BBB/pg/17/0000, the matriculation numbers (card numbers) and the
> barcode do not come out when the cards are printed. Card numbers are
> supposed to be printed printed as barcode. Our Koha LMS is Ubuntu OS
> based. 

> Can someone tell me what the problem is and suggest how to go round it please?

I suspect the problem is that the card numbers include lower case letters ("pg").
If your card layout uses Code 39 for the barcode, that won't work because
Code 39 does not allow lower case letters.  See this:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_39

I tried this on my own system, and verified this behavior.  However, when I changed
the card layout to use Code 39 + Modulo43 as the barcode format, which does support
lower case letters, Koha gave this error when I tried to export a library card batch:

  WARNING: Error while creating PDF file. Batch: 1 Layout: 1 Template: 1
  Please have your system administrator check the error log for details. 

I examined plack-error.log but didn't see anything that I could readily
understand as related to the problem.