• TAL Bar Code ActiveX Control
• TAL Bar Code ActiveX PLUS
• TAL Bar Code ActiveX Demo

If you insert the ActiveX Control onto a Microsoft Excel 2000 spreadsheet (or Other Microsoft products) running on Windows 2000 or Windows XP you may find that the text appears upside down and inside the bar code, rather than beneath it where it belongs. This can happen in Design Mode and out of Design Mode, and may print incorrectly also:

This problem does not occur on Windows 95/98 machines.

Check your version of Microsoft Office

This problem is sometimes caused by the drawing feature shared in Microsoft Office 2000 programs. There is a malfunction of drawing text in the mapped Enhanced Metafile. To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Microsoft Office 2000. For additional information, please see the following articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q264709: OFF2000: Characters Are Displayed Upside Down When You Insert EMF

Q276367: OFF2000: How to Obtain the Latest Office 2000 Service Pack

Check the font you are using for the Human Readable text

This can also happen if the font you are using for the human readable text is not a true-type font or is being mapped to another type of font. Fonts identified as printer fonts often have problems with rotation. Furthermore if font substitution is in effect a font which appears correctly on screen may not do so when printed and it may be necessary to edit the Windows font substitution table. See the Windows documentation for details of how to edit font substitutions.

Update/Reinstall your Printer Drivers

If the text looks fine on screen, but not when you use a Print Preview feature or when printed then, if possible, try printing to a different printer or type of printer to see if the problem still occurs. If the problem is only with that one particular printer (or you only have one to try) then try updating/reinstalling the printer driver.

One may find that PostScript versions of the Windows TrueType system fonts get substituted by the printer driver: Times New Roman becomes Times-Roman, and Arial becomes Helvetica. Furthermore, although the basic spacing of the substituted fonts is identical, their kerning pairs are not. This can cause text to reflow if one switches between two different-but-almost-the-same fonts when the computer is doing the typesetting.

Tweak your Windows settings

Getting the same font on the actual output can be guaranteed by changing printer settings in the printer control panel, to ensure the TrueType system fonts get used. Advanced users can also try editing the WIN.INI file on the computer that is doing the printing (whether to device or file). Delete the relevant lines in the font substitution section, so that the TrueType font used on-screen is also sent to the output device, rather than a printer font being substituted. On Windows NT/2000/XP or Win9x, Registry settings control the same behavior. Alternatively, get a scalable version of the font used in the printer, and use it instead of the system fonts.