Adding Special Characters

You can use the Insert Symbols or Special Characters dialog to add special characters, including many that are not available on standard keyboards, to various properties on the action properties tabs when you specify the value for the selected property. This feature is supported for any property for which the Insert Symbol control () is available on the toolbar.

ClosedTo add a special character to an action

  1. On the Create tab, click the event that you want, and then click the action that you want to update.

  2. Locate the property that you want to update, and then click the input field.

  3. On the toolbar, click , and then click a recently used special character or click More Symbols to open the Insert Symbols or Special Characters dialog.

  4. In the Insert Symbols or Special Characters dialog, locate and then click the special character that you want to add, and then click Insert.

Using Special Characters

The most important reason for using special characters is to encode data into a barcode. Some barcodes have encoding rules that require special characters. The Data Matrix barcode, for example, separates data into groups by using the Group Separator (GS) special character. There is no keyboard equivalent for this character; you must add it by using the Insert Symbols or Special Characters dialog in BarTender.

Special characters are also used to insert a newline. A newline is a character or characters that are used as a line break, such as the carriage return (CR) or line feed (LF) characters.

ClosedExample of how to use special characters as line breaks

Suppose you create a BarTender document that contains a QR Code barcode, and you assign a data source name to the QR Code to make it a named data source.

  1. Add a Print Document action to an event.

  2. On the Document tab of the Print Document action, browse to and then double-click the BarTender document that you created.

  3. On the Named Data Sources tab, click to select the Specify Values for Named Data Sources check box.

  4. In the Name cell, enter the name of the named data source that you previously created.

  5. In the Value cell, enter your value data. Between the value data items, use the Insert Symbols or Special Characters dialog to insert CR and LF characters. The following example uses "First", "Second", and "Third" as the data:

First<<CR>><<LF>>Second<<CR>><<LF>>Third

This operation causes the data in the named data source to be broken into three separate lines. When the printed barcode is scanned, the scanner reads the barcode's data on three separate lines.

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