Bulk Codabar barcode generator
Codabar batches come from places that number things in long, unbroken series: blood bank bags, library cards, film canisters, courier waybills. The symbology has no check digit and a start and stop character that carry meaning of their own, so a batch is mostly an exercise in keeping a series consistent from the first row to the last.
One value per line. A single line of comma- or semicolon-separated values works too. A header row (like “Value”) counts as a value and will be rejected — leave it out.
Nothing recognized yet.
Appearance
Enter a value — the code appears here.
Specification
- Character set
- letters and digits
- Length
- from 3 to 60 characters
- Check digit
- not used by this symbology
What is Codabar?
Need the specification and use cases first? What is Codabar?
Where this code earns its place in a batch
- Long unbroken series — donor bags, patient wristbands, library cards — where the numbers run into the tens of thousands and every one must be printable on cheap stock.
- Environments that never migrated: the code is self-checking per character and has been embedded in blood banking and library systems since the 1970s, so the readers are already there.
- Batches where nothing about a value depends on anything else in the list, which makes a series easy to extend a year later without recomputing anything.
Preparing the list
- Choose the start and stop characters once for the whole series — A, B, C or D — and keep them identical, since some systems read them as a format marker.
- Number the run with a fixed-width sequence: Codabar values are usually a continuous series, and a width that changes mid-run breaks the sorting downstream.
- Keep the character set to digits and the four permitted symbols; Codabar has no letters beyond the start and stop pair.
What goes wrong in a batch
- Varying the start and stop characters across a batch, which turns one series into several as far as the reading system is concerned.
- Assuming a check digit exists. It does not, and in a long series that means a single misread digit produces another valid number from the same range.
Frequently asked questions
- Why do library and blood bank systems still use Codabar?
- Because it is self-checking per character, prints reliably on poor stock, and has been embedded in those workflows since the 1970s. In a batch context its virtue is simplicity: nothing about the value depends on anything else in the list.
- Can I run several series in one batch?
- You can, but the start and stop characters are the only thing distinguishing them, and they are easy to overlook on a printed sheet. Separate runs keep the distinction visible.