So I was fiddling with my barcode scanner and was scanning the barcode of my Dell Service Tag. There were actually two barcodes on the tag, one that would scan that was Code 128, and the other that would not.
I did some detective work and figured out the one that wouldn't scan must be Interleaved Code 2 of 5.
From the wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleaved_2_of_5 I figured out how to manually decode it. It's actually pretty simple once you know that it encodes pairs of numbers, the widths of the black bars being the first number and the widths of the gaps being the second number.
Interleaved 2 of 5 has a start code of nnnn and stop code of Wnn which makes it a bit easier to spot now that I know what I'm looking for.
So for example the I2of5 barcode on my Optiplex 745 Desktop was "0019". Plugging that number into my Brother P-touch software and selecting I2of5 makes the exact same barcode.
But why wouldn't it scan?
I found a manual for my Symbol Spark and looked at its configuration barcodes, and enabled the I2of5 but it still wouldn't scan.
So I scanned the MIN Length I2of5 and then 0 and 0. (The Symbol Spark expects two digits when you scan the configuration barcodes and I was baffled why it wasn't working because I was only scanning a single number).
Now that I've got it configured correctly, the barcode scanner would scan those previously "invisible" barcodes.
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