About Upgrading BarTender

Users of BarTender 7.70 and higher can upgrade for free. Simply uninstall your existing copy of BarTender (please do not deactivate your existing license) and download the version 7.74 Trial Edition from our web site. When you install BarTender 7.74, your existing license will activate automatically, then you’re done.

Please Upgrade Printer Drivers Also

Many of the new BarTender features depend on the latest printer Drivers by Seagull (version 7.0.3) to function. Accordingly, if you upgrade your BarTender, you should download the latest drivers for their printers as well.

Overview of New Features

XML-Enabled Printer Support

Many printers can now directly accept XML data packets that contain ready-to-print text strings and the name of a label format already-stored in the printer. Because conventional printer commands are not used, no middleware is required to directly output label jobs from applications such as:

• SAP/R3
• Oracle's Warehouse Management System (WMS)
• Oracle's Mobile Supply Chain Applications (MSCA)
• and more

BarTender (Enterprise editions) can now easily output XML-ready label template files for XML-enabled printers from Datamax, Intermec, Printronix and Zebra, or you can customize printer code templates to support other printers.

New Media Handling and Enhanced Cutter Functions
With the latest printer Drivers by Seagull installed, BarTender provides greater control over page breaks, pausing and cutting during the print job. Functions that were previously available only from within the printer drivers can now be more easily controlled from within the Page Setup dialog of BarTender. Additional functions have been added as well. These actions can be triggered by any of a number of events (such as a new print job or label copy), by sensors (such as the Label Taken Sensor), or by changes in the actual data being printed.

RFID Additions

• Named RFID label stocks added for Intermec, SATO and others.
• RFID tag images added for existing label stocks from Rafsec, Impinj and Avery Dennison.

Recently added RFID printer support includes:

• UCODE EPC 1.19 tag support added for Monarch and Avery Dennison printers.
• EPC Gen 2 tag support added for printers from Avery Dennison, Intermec (IPL), TEC and Zebra (ZPL).

Code 128 Enhancements

• The "code set" for Code 128 bar codes can now be set manually.
• The exporting of Code 128 and UCC/EAN-128 bar codes in printer code templates has been improved.

Circle and Ellipse Design Objects

Draw perfect circles and stretch ellipses to any height-to-width ratio desired.

Other User-Interface Enhancements

• Bar code components in the design Toolbox are now organized into convenient folders for easier selection.
• Page Setup now offers more advanced page orientation options and more effects.

BarTender 7.7 adds Full-System Unicode Support

BarTender version 7.7 was released on July 5, 2005. It delivers full-system Unicode support, allowing it to process not only data containing any international characters, but to also handle international characters in names for files, fields, data paths and more. Version 7.7 also adds a number of other improvements, including the addition of the Micro QR Code 2-D symbology.

The Advantages of BarTender's Full-System Unicode Support

Many software applications that can read and print from Unicode databases still have many Unicode incompatibilities. For example, many programs cannot process a file or use a font that has Unicode characters in the name. In contrast, BarTender's Unicode solution addresses every aspect of data processing and data handling, including:

• Data from databases and text files
• Names of data tables and data fields
• Names, paths and network locations of files, printers and servers
• User names and passwords
• Printer fonts

Why the Unicode Standard Was Created

Before Microsoft added Unicode capabilities to Windows, your PC's displayable and printable characters were limited to whatever "character sets" you had installed in your operating system. For example, the Western European character set commonly installed in an American version of Windows includes all the letters of the English alphabet, plus enough accented versions of these characters to reproduce text from any Western European language. However, characters from non-Western European languages would be difficult or impossible to print without installing additional character sets and Windows language support. Unfortunately, Windows character sets and language support optimized for use in Asia and Eastern Europe are going to have similar limitations. And switching between the characters sets is not a trivial matter.

The Problem of Juggling Multiple Character Sets

Microsoft's original solution to the multiple character set challenge is a process called "Code Paging." Windows software applications that took advantage of code paging would execute printer commands and display commands to indicate which character set to use. For complex global business requirements, the software could switch between character sets, but the process was clumsy and it could be temperamental. For example, suppose you were reading from an Access database intended to supply Chinese characters to your software. If your operating system defaulted to the wrong code page and you clicked on a data table to view its contents, you would see "garbage" data that you could not read or modify. (If you have ever seen garbage characters on a foreign-language web page, you are encountering this same code page problem.)

Understanding Unicode

Unicode is a standard that provides an easier, more powerful way to read and print international characters. It is an enormous character set that literally contains all international characters as well as a wide variety of symbols. (For you technophiles, although there are of course Unicode-compatible fonts available, the Unicode standard defines only a character "mapping" - it is not actually itself a font.)

When your operating system is Unicode-capable, software applications that have been properly designed to take advantage of it make it much easier for you to process, print and display data containing any combination of international characters.

More Details of BarTender's Unicode Support

• Include text from multiple languages in a single text object or data substring.
• Import data from databases in which the language varies from field to field and record to record.
• Print languages that are supported only by Unicode. (Some languages are so rare their characters appear only in the Unicode character set!)
• Take advantage of printer-based Unicode fonts for high performance printing of labels with multiple languages.*
• Copy and paste text with multiple languages to and from other applications.
• Access files, printers and servers whose names, paths and network locations contain any international characters.*
• Read from databases that have international characters in the names of the server, database, user, password, tables and fields.*
• Improved support for Windows' Input Method Editors for typing international characters.
• Print subscript and superscript characters for chemical formulas, footnotes, mathematical equations, etc.
• All Seagull Scientific software applications now support instant switching of the user-interface between international languages (including some situations that previously required a reboot).

*Not available in Windows 98

Other New Features in BarTender 7.7

More Font Style Options - Font Style Emulation lets you choose bold and italic font styles even with fonts that do not natively support these styles. For example, many fonts are equipped only with "Regular" style, but not Bold, Italic, Light, or combinations of styles. BarTender now fills-in the "missing" styles for all fonts in your system, using a technology similar to Microsoft's Font Style Emulation that can be seen in such programs as Microsoft Word.

Expanded Input and Output Data Encoding Options - BarTender 7.7 adds:

• More flexible encodings for database reading and BarTender job logging.
• Support for Unicode (UTF-16), Unicode (Big Endian), Unicode (UTF-8), and Korean (Johab).

Improved Reading Order Support - BarTender 7.7 has expanded control over the appearance of text that mixes right-to-left languages (such as Hebrew and Arabic) with left-to-right languages.

Support for Micro QR Code - This very dense 2D code is useful for encoding more data and international characters in tight spaces.

Easier User Interface

• New wizards speed beginners through label setup
  • Starting a new label design
  • Choosing the right label stock, label rows, columns, margins, etc.
  • Users can still choose manual label setup if preferred
• Wizards for power users too
  • A simpler way to combine bar code data from multiple data sources
  • Easy organizing and processing of EAN.UCC Application Identifiers.
  • Simpler data “substring” management.
• Quickly preview and print label designs without opening formats
  • More detailed thumbnail preview provided by BarTender
  • Detailed thumbnail views now also available in Windows Explorer
  • Quickly print a format by right-clicking its previewed image, and selecting “print.”
  • “Auto-completion” for filenames typed into dialog boxes

Enhanced Database Connectivity

• OLE DB data sources now supported. (ODBC still supported.)
• New wizard simplifies connecting to a database

New Software Activation

• Online activation—provides an easy, secure way to authenticate software licenses.
• No more hardware keys for Enterprise Edition

User-definable Background Images

• Specify a background label image to appear “behind” your label design
• Also add a background color
• Automatically “bleed” backgrounds beyond label edges to ensure full coverage in case of label slippage or poor printer registration

Support for Printer Clocks

• Time and date stamps can now be read from the printer’s real time clock
• Existing use of computer’s clock still supported

Seagull Scientific has added RFID support to many of its Windows printer drivers (version 6.7 and higher). As long as a copy of BarTender is installed on the same PC as the drivers, users of selected RFID-capable printer models will be able to encode the radio frequency identification tags on "smart labels" at the same time that the labels are printing.

BarCode Symbologies added:

• Reduced Space Symbology (RSS)
   - RSS-14 Truncated, Stacked, Stacked Omi-Directional
   - RSS Limited, Expanded, Expanded Stacked
   - Composite RSS-14, Truncated, Stacked, Stacked Omni-Directional
   - Composite RSS Limited, Expanded, Expanded Stacked

• EAN.UCC Composite
   - Composite UCC/EAN-128 CC-A/CC-B
   - Composite UCC/EAN-128 CC-C
   - Composite UPC-A
   - Composite EAN/JAN-8
   - Composite EAN/JAN-13

• Aztec

• Telepen

Printer Code Template generation

Auto Sizing for text objects with multiple fonts

Ordering database query prompts

New VB Script functions and Objects
 - UCC Application Identifier formatting
 - VB Script Email object