Storing bar code formats within a printer is the most effective way to save network traffic, especially in a manufacturing environment, says David Terry, director of TallyGenicom.
"In today's day and age, everyone uses bar codes to label their goods, and to ensure they have the correct information attached to those goods."
According to Terry, the printing of bar codes can clog network traffic if the images are sent to a printer in a graphical format. "A graphical print format takes up significantly more network traffic than a bar code printed using an ASCII format, combined with a printer's resident bar code fonts," he says.
A printer must read and interpret a hexadecimal (hex) dump generated by print jobs, and graphical hex dumps are significantly longer than those that are generated by ASCII. "A good manufacturing IT infrastructure will have bar code formats resident in its printers," says Terry.
When bar codes are embedded in a printer, all that needs to be generated from the system is an escape sequence telling the printer the type of bar code required and the data to be encoded, he says. "The firmware will hold the parameters required to produce a barcode, and the printer will then generate it, not the software."
Terry says because bar codes are printer-generated and not spooled by the software, it will increase printing speeds for batch printing of bar codes, and the readability will be better. "Printer-generated bar codes will be exact and they do not rely on image resolution."
These images will never have to be resized or changed, because the proportions are specified in the printer's firmware, Terry adds.
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