What is a Telepen Alpha barcode?
Telepen was developed in the UK by SB Electronic Systems in 1972 and became widely used in British libraries and universities for book and borrower labels. Telepen Alpha is the standard mode, which encodes all 128 ASCII characters.
Unlike most older linear codes, Telepen encodes the full ASCII set directly without shift pairs. A modulo 127 check character is always included as part of the symbol, so you do not need to add one yourself.
Use Telepen Alpha when your library or campus system expects Telepen. If the data is digits only, Telepen Numeric produces a shorter barcode, and for general use Code 128 is more widely supported.
What data can Telepen Alpha hold?
Any of the 128 ASCII characters, including upper and lowercase letters, digits, punctuation and spaces. Non-ASCII characters such as accented letters are not allowed.
Recommended size
Keep a quiet zone of at least 10 times the narrowest bar on each side. Long text makes the barcode wide, so keep library or ID numbers short.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Telepen Alpha encodes every ASCII character, one per symbol character. Telepen Numeric encodes digits in pairs, so a number-only barcode is roughly half as long.
The Telepen check character is always part of the symbol and is added automatically. Scanners verify it and do not send it with the data.
Many scanners support Telepen, but it is usually disabled by default. Turn it on in the scanner settings, which is common in library setups.