Member Avatar for rianbattle

Good morning,

I'm curious on how one would go about encoding the data for a UPS Maxicode barcode on a ZPL label. Currently we generate our own ZPL file using a template which we fill our data in with through a VB.NET program. The Maxicode barcode command is using all of the segments required filled out, nothing encoded or anything, just plain text. This normally works perfectly, unless for example the city happens to be more characters than a certain amount. When this happens, the Maxicode on the label comes out as black bar with the text "Invalid Line", and we have to manually adjust the data to force the barcode to display correctly when reprinting the label.

I haven't had any luck researching how to properly encode the data for a Maxicode, there are a lot of questions and articles asking how to decode them, in which there is mention of a DLL that UPS uses to decode these. I haven't been able to find anything related on UPS.com related to this matter, though.

Any leads would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

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Member Avatar for cgeier

This documentation also provides some information on Maxicode (although it doesn't look like their product supports .NET).

Member Avatar for rianbattle

Thank you for the suggestions and replies. We are actually using the program for UPS because of the need to generate Sure Post labels without manually generating them in house (it's a really easy system...send them the data and get your label back to send to the printer). We only use the API to generate the Sure Post labels so those aren't a problem, but in house we create the ground labels ourselves (which is where we need the compression). I have tried contacting them but no luck so far...I was hoping for another suggestion but all leads seem to point to going through them to obtain what we need (or rewriting all our logic to send everything through UPS).

Thanks again for the replies!

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