[reportlab-users] Asterisks in barcode human readable text

[Tim Roberts]

Adrian Klaver wrote:
> On 04/13/2015 10:20 AM, Andy Robinson wrote:
>> The problem here is that nobody at ReportLab is a bar code specialists
>> - quite a lot of this code was contributed or copied from other
>> libraries years ago - and we don't know whether it is actually correct
>> or not to allow these characters in this position.  If you have time
>> to check the specifications, and/or there is evidence that other
>> libraries do this, we could modify humanText to make life easier.
> Well from the sidelines and having debugged barcode issues I would say 
> all characters specified in the code should be shown in human readable 
> output.

This is not a slam-dunk obvious decision.  The ISO and ANSI standards
for Code39 all cost money, so I don't know what the actual
specifications require.

Technically, the * character is NOT included in the code.  It is the
Start/Stop symbol.  If you want to include "*" in a Code39 string, you
have to encode it as /J.

On the other hand, virtually all the examples I can find on the web do
print the start/stop symbol as * when rendering the human-readable
text.  That seems like the most common interpretation.

-- 
Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.