Creating bar codes

To create a bar code, you must choose an industry-standard format and specify the digits that the Barcode wizard encodes. You can create various types of bar codes, including 13-digit ISBN bar codes. You can edit a bar code at a later time.

Changing industry-standard properties

When you generate a bar code, you can change many of the industry-standard properties to improve the ease with which it can be read by a scanner. The bar code must be readable the first time it is passed under a scanner.

The look of a bar code is affected by five settings: printer resolution, bar width reduction, magnification, bar height, and the wide-to-narrow ratio.

Printing distortions that affect the bar code measurements may occur. You can set the bar width reduction — the number of pixels subtracted from the original bar width — to prevent any distortions. Magnification increases the size of the entire image, while bar height changes only the height of the bars. Wide-to-narrow ratio refers to the distance between wide bars and spaces and the narrow bars. A high ratio makes the bar code wider and easier to scan.

You can change the font, weight, alignment, and size text options.

You can change the appearance of a bar code by changing the bar code options. For example, you can place add-on text at the bottom or at the top of a bar code, center check digits, and show start and stop characters.

To create a bar code

1 .	In CorelDRAW, click Edit Insert Barcode.

The completed bar code is added to the drawing as an object.

Wide bar codes are read more accurately than narrow bar codes.

To create a 13-digit ISBN bar code

1 .	In CorelDRAW, click Edit Insert Barcode.

To edit the bar code directly, cut the bar code, and paste it back into CorelDRAW as a Windows metafile (WMF).

To edit a bar code

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