A large pharmaceutical company is using an ancient lab system that prints cryo labels for test tubes. They replaced Intermec 3400 printers that were almost 20 years old with new PC43T printers. The PC43T runs IPL (Intermec Print Language) and should have been a plug and play replacement. Unfortunately, some of the barcodes that printed on the 3400 no longer printed on the PC43T. The problem was caused by the different designs of the two printers. The PC43T’s labels are centered in the printer instead of all the way to the left (as you are facing the printer) on the 3400. Without getting into too much detail, their label format had to be modified to use the PC43T, but due to the age of the system this turned out to be impossible. The labels are .5 by 1.25 inches:
These are Code 128 barcodes printed with a 5 mil X (narrow bar) dimension.
We wrote a Fingerprint program that ran in the PC43T that intercepted data coming from the host, reformatted it into Direct Protocol (which has a center justify feature) and printed the label. Problem solved.