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More and more often, printed items containing barcodes need to have extra characters printed in the barcode's human readable characters that are not part of the barcode to be scanned. For example, the GS1-128 (UCC/EAN-128) barcode used on the UCC-128 shipping container labels required by several large retail stores requires extra spaces and parentheses in the human readable characters. These characters are not part of the barcode and are therefore not read into the computer by the barcode reader.

Using the Character Template dialog, accessible from the Human Readable property page, you can specify these extra characters and their position in the data string. The following figure shows a simple example of the type of data an item may require (in this case, the price for a product in a store).

The barcode below contains the numeric data string "1099", and the character template reads "$??.??".

Each question mark in the Template field signifies one character from the actual barcode data string. The $ sign and decimal point represent the extra data that will appear in the human readable characters, but not in the barcode itself. For a complete list of available characters in the character template, refer to the documentation on the Character Template dialog.