Barcode Generator

Yes. All fourteen symbologies, every customisation option, the templates and every export format are free, with no account, no watermark and no cap on how many barcodes you make.

No. The barcode is encoded and drawn by your own browser — there is no network request involved in generating, previewing, printing or downloading one. You can disconnect after the page loads and keep working. That matters because barcode data is often a product code, a tracking number or a patient identifier.

Yes. A barcode is a rendering of a number you supply; there is nothing to license in the symbol itself. What you may need to pay for is the *number* — a GS1 company prefix, if you want an EAN or UPC that is unique worldwide and will scan at a retailer's till.

Code 128 unless something forces your hand. It takes any ASCII text, packs digits two per symbol so numeric codes stay narrow, and every scanner made in the last thirty years reads it. Use EAN-13 or UPC-A only for retail products with a real GS1 number, and Code 39 only when a system you cannot change demands it.

The densest and most capable 1D symbology: the full ASCII set, an automatic numeric mode that halves the width of digit strings, and a mandatory check digit. For an internal code — an asset tag, a shipping reference, a warehouse location — it is almost always the right answer.

Almost nothing technical. A UPC-A is an EAN-13 whose first digit is zero, drawn with the identical 95 modules. The split is administrative and historical: UPC came first in North America, EAN extended it internationally. Every modern scanner reads both and most systems store them interchangeably.

You can generate the symbol here, and it will scan. Whether you should *use* it depends on where: for internal stock control, any valid number is fine. To sell through a retailer you need a number allocated from a GS1 company prefix, because that is what guarantees it belongs to your product and nobody else's.

The last digit of an EAN, UPC or ISBN, calculated from the ones before it. A scanner recalculates it and rejects the read if it disagrees — which is how a smudged or partly obscured barcode fails safely rather than reading as a different product. This tool calculates it for you if you leave it off, and tells you the right value if you get it wrong.

Yes. Since 2007 every ISBN is thirteen digits beginning 978 or 979, which makes it a valid EAN-13 — so a book barcode is an ordinary retail barcode. Paste a ten-digit ISBN and the tool works out the thirteen-digit equivalent for you.

Yes. The eight-digit ISSN is prefixed with 977, given two issue-variant digits and a fresh check digit. That is why the number printed under a magazine barcode does not match the ISSN on its masthead — they are related but not the same number.

The same bars with a grammar on top. Each field starts with an Application Identifier in brackets — (01) a product number, (17) an expiry date, (10) a batch — so the scanner knows what it read rather than getting an opaque string. This is what is on a pallet label or a pharmaceutical carton.

Because it is a compression, not a format. UPC-E squeezes a twelve-digit UPC-A into six by removing runs of zeros, and only codes with the zeros in the right places can be compressed at all. That is why UPC-E numbers are allocated deliberately rather than derived from any UPC-A you happen to have.

It is a number written in bars — narrow for 1, wide for 2, read right to left — used on pharmaceutical packaging lines. It has no check digit because it is not a lookup: the machine already knows which carton it expects, and the scan confirms it. That also makes it robust when printed badly, which is the point.

That is what this tool does continuously. Length, character set and check digit are checked as you type, and generation is refused rather than producing a symbol that scans as something else. Where a check digit is wrong, the correct value is named.

Bigger than you think, and it depends on how it will be read. A retail EAN-13 is nominally 37.29 × 25.93 mm and may be scaled between 80% and 200% of that. For anything else, the practical rule is that a handheld scanner needs the narrow bar to be at least 0.25 mm, and that a taller barcode is easier to scan at an angle.

The clear space either side of the symbol. It is not margin — it is part of the barcode, and a scanner uses it to find where the symbol starts and ends. Ten times the narrow bar width is the usual minimum. Cropping it off is the single most common reason a printed barcode fails to read.

Cautiously. Scanners measure contrast, and many use red light — which cannot distinguish red bars from a white background at all. Dark bars on a light background is the only combination that reliably works; black on white is the only one guaranteed to.

SVG or PDF for anything that will be printed, because both are vector and stay crisp at any size — and a barcode is all about crisp edges. PNG for screens and documents. WebP when file size matters. JPEG only if something downstream demands it: its compression softens exactly the hard edges a scanner reads.

It multiplies the pixel dimensions of the raster exports. Standard is screen resolution, HD doubles it, and Print quadruples it — roughly 384 dpi, enough for a label printer. It has no effect on SVG or PDF, which are resolution-independent already.

Yes, if you print from this tool: the print view sends the barcode at its exact dimensions rather than scaling it to fit the page. Scaling is what breaks printed barcodes — a symbol shrunk to fit an A4 margin can end up with bars too narrow for a scanner to resolve.

Not from this tool directly — it produces one barcode at a time. Download as SVG or PDF and place them in whatever does your label layout; because both are vector, they can be repeated and positioned without any loss of quality.

Almost always the symbology. Code 39 takes roughly three times the width of Code 128 for the same digits, because it encodes one character per nine elements with no numeric mode. If a code is too wide to fit its label, switching to Code 128 is usually the whole fix.

No, deliberately. This tool covers one-dimensional barcodes only. QR codes, Data Matrix and the other 2D symbologies work on entirely different principles — error correction, masking, a two-axis grid — and live in the QR Code Generator instead.

Once the page has loaded, yes. Encoding, rendering, printing and every export happen locally, so it keeps working with the network disconnected.

It is the fallback. When a barcode will not scan — damaged label, poor print, broken scanner — somebody has to key the number in, and the human-readable line is what they read. Hiding it makes a tidier symbol and a worse one.