No, you do not need a special barcode printer. However, a different printer can make quite a difference, I know from experience. We have had great success with a cheap brother laser printer (HL-1230), but we could also read barcodes printed with an Epson Stylus C84, and we used an old Canon laser beast, until it broke, and that worked fine too.
Barcodes do need a bit of “white space” around them, our first labels were too small but worked fine on a white or light background, and also on black backgrounds, but anything in between would not work.
That being said, it can be your printer. We can print barcodes to PDF files (we use kbarcode, see kbarcode.net) but even if they look identical to the ones that are printed straight from the program, our stubborn barcode reader refuses to read them. I talked to it, I’ve been nice, I’ve been not so nice, but that has never worked that way. So we do not PDF them anymore.
Did you try reading other barcodes? Like you find on any product nowadays?
Hope this helps a bit,
Marty
-----Original
Message-----
From:
koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-bounces@lists.katipo.co.nz]
On Behalf Of kenneth
rotich
Sent:
Monday, November 19,
2007 12:11
PM
To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz
Subject: [Koha] barcodes- can ordinary
printer be used?
we have successfully intalled koha for windows 2.2.8 and we are currently testing and customizing to fit our needs.
we have generated some barcodes using the normal printer but these barcodes cannot be read by the barcode reader. Do we have to use special printer to print barcodes? please help. thanks
ken rotich
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