Welcome to the Barcode for Mac Help System!

This help file will give you an overview of the product and a step-by-step description on the generation of barcodes with Barcode For Mac. Please see also the link to our website at the bottom of this document. The additional information we provide on our site will help you get the most out of this software.

Important: Barcode For Mac is a native Mac OS X application that will not run on older systems like Mac OS 9!

In the context of this document, useful background info as well as tips and tricks are indicated by a

What is Barcode For Mac?

Barcode For Mac enables you to generate almost every common barcode directly from within virtually any Application, be it a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database system or a DTP layout program. The software will generate the following codes:

Installing Barcode For Mac

Installation is a simple two step process that will only take a few seconds:

1. Within the archive you downloaded form our site or received on a CD ROM locate the folder "Fonts" (If you downloaded the evaluation version of the software this folder will be named "FontsEval"). Open the folder an copy all fonts to your systems Fonts folder, usually at /Library/Fonts.

2. From the archive copy the "barcode for mac.app", that's the frontend (see below) to your Mac's Applications folder, usually at /Applications.

That's it!

Note: The trial version of the software will place the word EVAL near the barcode. Nevertheless the code will scan just fine.

How does Barcode For Mac work?

During installation a collection of fonts were installed on your Mac that, when properly used, build the bars and spaces that make up a barcode. Accompanying the fonts is the "Frontend", an application that calculates checksums if desired and performs all formatting and conversion on your data required to generate a valid barcode.

Basically the fonts supplied with Barcode For Mac are just that, plain fonts. That means if you launch AppleWorks, enter "1234567", select this string and change the font to, say, Code EAN, you will see some bars and spaces that may look like a "real" barcode. However, unless the code you selected is very simple this procedure will not lead to a valid code, that is if you print the code most likely it will not be recognizable by any barcode scanner. Hence the need for the "Frontend" application that formats your data accordingly.

See the following link for a step-by-step description on how to create a single valid barcode:

Create a single valid barcode

While many applications require only a single barcode to be converted and displayed, sometimes the need may arise to create a great number of codes at a time. You may for instance want to convert the complete column of an Excel sheet into barcodes. See the following link for a step-by-step description on how to handle this task:

Create more than one barcode at a time

Licensing issues:

Barcode For Mac is available as a single user license, as a multi-user license (10 users) and as an unlimited site license. Also available are licenses for developers who wish to distribute our fonts with their applications. See our website for details.

 

Visit us on the web: http://www.pro-barcode.com

(c)2002-2006 Wolf Software. All rights reserved.