Azalea Software, Inc.

Printing PDF 417 Bar Codes in Visual Basic

If you are printing PDF417 bar codes from within Visual Basic, the easiest thing to do is use our PDF417MBA.DLL and our VB wrapper after installing our fonts.

If you don't already own our PDF 417 package you can download and install our PDF 417 demo. While the steps below describe working with our PDF 417 demo, the same procedure works using the full retail package too.

DemoPDF417MBA.DLL and DemoPDF417BMP.DLL will be installed into your \WINDOWS\SYSTEM or \WINNT\SYSTEM32 directory. The VB wrapper, DemoPDF417Font.dll and DemoPDF417bitmap.dll, are ActiveX DLL's written and compiled with VB6 and may be put wherever you want.

In Visual Basic, create a new .exe project. Add a reference to DemoPDF417Font.DLL which should be in \Program Files\Azalea\Demo PDF417\VB wrappers directory.

On your form (form1), create two text boxes (text1 and text2) and a command button (command1).

Set both text boxes' multiline property to true. text1 will hold your input data and text2 will hold the output data. Format text2 in one of the AzaleaMBA fonts using a small point size.

Give the function three parameters:

YourInput is the content of text1. The AspectRatio determines the shape of the symbol. The SecurityLevel determines how robust the symbol is against misreads.

example: text2.text = AzaleaPDF417MBAregularDEMO("test", 6, 3)

Creating PDF 417 bar codes using bitmaps

In Visual Basic, create a new .exe project. Add a reference to DemoPDF417bitmap.DLL which should be in \Program Files\Azalea\Demo PDF417\VB wrappers directory.

On your form (form1), create a text box (text1), a picture box (picture1), and a command button (command1).

Set the text box's multiline property to true. text1 will hold your input data and picture1 will load the bar code from a temp file.

Give the function three parameters:

YourInput is the content of text1. The AspectRatio determines the shape of the symbol. The SecurityLevel determines how robust the symbol is against misreads. FullPath is the path to the bitmap with the bar code.

example: AzaleaPDF417BMPregularDEMO ("test", 6, 3, "C:\test.bmp")
                    picture1.Picture = LoadPicture("C:\test.bmp")