[Sussex] Barcode scanning and EPOS

[Geoff Teale]

With regard to Dominic's need I should imagine that you could run a book
selling business happily by just using the barcodes already present on
books (ISBN and ISSN are industry standard barcode formats).  

You can find ISBN info in this pdf file...

http://www.cappella.demon.co.uk/tinypdfs/05barco.pdf

.. but you should never need to generate one yourself.

However, if you plan on carrying non-book stock you may need to barcode
it separately.  EAN codes are used by most retailers, but I'd favour
something like code-128, which allows the barcode to contain some kind
of human readable information (because it supports a full ASCII set
rather than just numerals).  We find this useful at work, for instance I
have barcodes from one of our systems that read:

cd:dubya1-a.11155

.. which tells me that this barcode refers to node 11155 created by the
user dubya1-a (dubya is my work pc's hostname).  

Equally the barcode could read :

bookmark:fish

... so long as that identifier was uniquely matched in your database
this would be useful.  One obvious advantage is that you can see that
the right barcode is affixed to the right product. 

As John pointed out, 2d tagging is the best tech currently available -
it allows for much more robust barcodes and the encoding of greater
amounts of data.  However I imagine generation and scanning of such
codes is probably somewhat beyond the reach of small businesses in the
short term (please correct me if I am talking out of unusual orifices).

-- 
Geoff Teale
general: <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
home   : <geoff at tealeg.uklinux.net>
work   : <gteale at cmedltd.com>
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