Hi,

Is it possible to print 2D Barcodes in baan reports . if yes how to go about it . Any info would be of great help

Regards
Ayoobi

It is not possiblle to have 2D or 3D barcodes from BaaN. Only linear barcodes.

You can print 2D bar codes by sending the appropriate character strings to the printer. For example, we have an Intermec printer (that supports 2D bar codes) and we send Intermec IPL commands to the printer to produce bar codes. Granted, it is not a simple process, but it isn't awful either (especially once you get the hang of it).

evesely.

Can I assume that you had to add the IPL commands to the print
driver for Baan? Or did you use the some UNIX (if you on on Unix) printer special configuration to do this?

We are presently looking into printing 2D barcodes (PDF417), but are going to feed a file from BaaN to a third party package (I believe it is Barman). We may, at some time, look into the possiblility of InterMec printers as well, that is why the curiousity.

Thanks


All this Bar talk is making me thirsty!

We have done this to create various type of labels. Sometimes we skip using the report and write to the device through the program script; other times we use a report. In each case, we are writing the IPL commands to the device. We have a very simple driver for unix which links some printer code features with some IPL codes. For NT, we do it in a more direct manner.

There's another possibility by using ZPL2.
If you use the zpl2 codings within your report or program script, you can manage the printer to print 2d barcode's.
In my case I designed a long reportscript with all the codings, which was enough to print 'normal', 1d barcoding and even 2d codings at the same report(read: labels).
normaly you can find these codings in the manual of the printer you are using (as far as I know HP doesn't support 2d printing, but Zebra does).

Regards.

:)

Thanks for your input above. I have just completed a simple label using Intermec IPL. It took about one day to deterine the IPL required for placing 20 fields on a label. I thought I could give a little more detail below in case it is helpful for someone.

I had the Baan developer output the IPL to a regular Baan report, and then in Baan I set up a Device as follows:

Device: LBAR1
Type: Rewrite File
4GL Program: ttstpconv
Argument: ASCII\lp -c -s -dlbar1 -oraw %s

This way the Baan report gets converted to a pure text file containing just the IPL and no formatting. The printer can then apply its own formatting, barcodes, boxes, etc. according to the IPL.

The Intermec IPL manual is available on intermec.com

I definitely recommend this solution for single labels, where you can't necessarily justify the cost of buying label design and generation software. If I had many labels to do and constant changes to make, I wouldn't want to do it this way every time!

Regards,
Rob Somogyi