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I'm trying to use some barcodes applied to product by another company, but we can't!

We have Symbol LS1203 tethered scanners and Linea Pro 5s in our business, but both have failed to scan these codes. I've gone through the programming document for the LS1203 and enabled every different symbology with no luck.

The company who use these barcodes are able to scan them with Symbol LS2208s which seem to support all the same formats as our 1203s.

Can anyone help me identify these codes?!

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MrWedders
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What you got there is your garden variety Code 39 symbology that has been partially chopped off at the head and tail.

enter image description here

Brian Anderson
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  • We thought it looked like a Code 39 but couldn't understand why they wouldn't scan - thanks! Are there legitimate reasons for omitting these quite important characters? It's obviously just causing us a headache! – MrWedders May 23 '18 at 08:33
  • This is a bounding box issue, probably brought on by one too many characters than expected. I sincerely doubt an LS2208s or any scanner would have no problem scanning because the corrupted characters on either side are the start / stop characters for Code 39 ("*"). Compare screen to print output and you will usually find the discrepancy. – Brian Anderson May 23 '18 at 11:19
  • Apparently it’s not unheard of: http://www.bardecode.com/en1/code-39-barcodes-with-no-startstop-characters/ – Jim Grisham Mar 02 '21 at 22:10
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    @JimGrisham, in this particular case, the last 1/2 of the start character was visible and the first 1/2 of the stop character was visible. The characters weren't omitted. They were partially cropped from the image. – Brian Anderson Mar 03 '21 at 22:31
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    @BrianAnderson Fair. I posted that to perhaps explain why some scanners were able to read the cropped codes. [One could imagine someone doing this on purpose (e.g. to enable one class of scanners to read the code, such in a warehouse, but to prevent them from being scanned by POS scanners ... or vice-versa). Not saying that was true in this case (and your overflow / bounding box idea makes sense) but for the info of the kids out there: doing this intentionally is probably not a wise development practice, IMHO, but crazier things have been done. Output perfection, accept imperfection.] – Jim Grisham Mar 03 '21 at 22:40
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    @JimGrisham Agreed, using non-standard barcodes or even unpopular configurations drives cost to the business and ultimately, the end customer – Brian Anderson Mar 04 '21 at 18:08