Troubleshooting Barcode Generation
- 2 minutes to read
Common Issues (FAQ)
This section describes common barcode generation and scanning issues and explains how to resolve them.
The barcode is too “dense”
The more information you want to encode, the more bars the barcode requires and the larger the barcode becomes.
The BarcodeOptions.ModuleSize property specifies the width of the narrowest bar in a barcode. Although you can set this property to a very small Double value, the actual value is determined by the maximum resolution of your barcode printer device.
Note
When barcodes are “dense” and you set the Module value manually, make sure that multiplying this value by the barcode printer resolution results in an integer number. Otherwise, rounding errors may occur when calculating the resulting bar width.
For example, when the Module is set to 0.015 inches and the printer resolution is 300 DPI, their product equals 4.5, which may be rounded to 4 or 5 pixels for different bars and result in barcode recognition errors. In this case, the Module property should be set to 0.01333 (to make the bar width equal to 4 pixels) or to 0.01667 (to make the bar width equal to 5 pixels).
The barcode appears in the preview but the scanner does not read it
Configure the scanner to recognize the barcode type. If you are not certain about how to operate the scanner, refer to the product manual.
Avoid scanning barcodes from the monitor screen, because the screen DPI may not be sufficient to recognize each bar.
The barcode appears in the preview but the scanner reads it incorrectly
This issue can be caused by an encoding issue specific to the “binary” input mode.
String values use UTF-16 encoding (see Character Encoding in .NET). Your scanner device may use a different encoding model or a code page (a table that maps abstract values to characters). Refer to the scanner specification for details.
The “There are invalid characters in the text” error occurs
Different barcode symbologies define different ranges of allowed characters under different character sets. To avoid this error, check the barcode specification.