Symptom

When trying to print a template with a barcode object, you may receive the following error message:

Error Message #3753: The following error was encountered while encoding barcode object "[Object name]" with data "[data string]": 

Encoding Error: The selected symbology does not support the following characters: '.','e','+'

Applicable to

BarTender Designer

Solution

This error message means that the barcode data contains some invalid characters. In other words, there is a character given to the barcode that it does not support.

In order to resolve this you will need to take the following steps:

1. Verify the Data Source from within the Barcode properties
2. Remove any unsupported characters to ensure that the data complies with the Barcode symbology:

Using an External Database

If the Data Source type is Database Field you will need to follow the below steps:

1. Make sure that the data supplied in the Field name specified below does not contain any invalid characters.
2. The name and location of the database file can be found by clicking on the Database Connection Setup button:   
3. This issue commonly occurs when using an Excel database that automatically adjusts the cell type to a Scientific Notation, instead of regular Text or Number. This causes the data to change and include characters that a barcode does not support and cannot encode.
4. Within the Excel file, the field format needs to be changed to Text. For steps to do this, please see: Database records does not match or missing data with Excel database.

Additional Resources

For further information on specification of Barcodes, please refer to the guides below.

• Barcode guide
• Barcode symbology