If you are looking to produce bar code cards for meal scanning. We use Code 39 extended (full) ASCII. The scanner pumps ASCII characters into the keyboard buffer which looks like *~A1234{ESC}*
The start/stop character for code 39 is *
%S is ~
%A is ESC
This is what is inside of the SchoolWise barcode: "*%SA" + alltrim(str(Results.stuid)) + "%A*"
This tells SchoolWise that when ~A comes through the keyboard buffer that the next characters are text numbers and the end of those is ESC. Our student ID numbers are integers and they need to be converted to text. That is what alltrim(str(Results.stuid)) is. STR converts a number to a string and Alltrim trims off any leading or trailing characters.
The bar code font that is used is attached to this document.