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Telepen

Telepen is a one-dimensional symbology designed to be highly reliable even when printed by ordinary printers not intended for barcode printing. Any of the lower 128 ASCII characters can be encoded. Every character takes the same amount of space, so barcode length will not vary unless the data length itself varies. A modulo 127 check character is used. You can achieve greater barcode density by specifying at label-design-time that the barcode should be numeric-only.

ClosedThe Character Set

The characters set includes 128 ASCII characters as binary data. No shift character is needed. In numeric-only applications, the character set is 0-9.

ClosedThe Density

Symbols can encode up to eight ASCII characters per inch, or 16 digits per inch in numeric-only applications.

ClosedThe Symbology Structure

There are 3-module wide bars and spaces and 1-module wide bars and spaces. Every character is 16 modules wide. Optionally, each symbol begins with a start character and ends with stop character (see below). There is a quiet zone on both ends. Just before the stop character there is a modulo 127 check character. Between the start character (if there is one) and the check character are one or more data characters, each of which encodes 8 bits with even parity. In numeric only applications, each character can encode two digits.

Elements within a character are read with the least significant digit on the left.

ClosedThe Start and Stop Characters

The Telepen specification sets the start character to be binary 01011111, which is the ASCII underscore character, "_". Physically it is:

5 narrow bar/narrow space pairs

1 wide bar/wide space pair

The stop character is 11111010, which is the ASCII "z" character. Physically, it is:

1 wide bar/wide space pair

5 narrow bar/narrow space pairs

However, some barcode readers are programmed to assume a non-standard form of the Telepen symbology. To accommodate them, BarTender enables you to have the start/stop characters set by the database or to not use start/stop characters at all. You can also use one, but not the other.

ClosedThe Check Digit

The last character, not counting the stop character is a check digit produced by the modulo 127 check sum method.