Printing & Troubleshooting Bar Codes

If you are having any issues displaying or printing bar codes, check out the minimum bar code requirements and troubleshooting tips in the following sections.

Bar Code Requirements

Liaison Athena renders bar codes in Acrobat Reader. For this reason, you must have Acrobat Reader 4.0 (or higher) installed on your computer in order to open and print Athena's bar codes. You can print your bar codes using a laser printer or specialized bar code printer.

Bar Codes Are Not Opening

Upon clicking the Print Bar Codes icon, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) users may be see a "To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has blocked this site from downloading files to your computer. Click here for options..." message in yellow across the top of the Athena Web site. But then, when selecting "Download File..." from the list of options, instead of the file opening, Athena refreshes and the open message is lost. Or, some users may see nothing happening at all when they attempt to print a bar code. In the following paragraphs, we'll offer some suggestions on how to prevent these open issues in IE7.

If bar codes are not opening for you in IE7 (these potential fixes do not apply to Firefox), check/try the following, in order:

Make sure pop-up blockers are not enabled for the Athena Web site. In IE7, pop-up blockers are enabled/disabled by selecting Tools|Pop-up Blocker while you have the Athena Web site open. Pop-up blockers are also built into third-party toolbars like Google and Yahoo! so, if you have one of these toolbars installed, be sure to check its pop-up settings as well.
Try holding down the CTRL key while clicking the Print Bar Codes option. Continue holding this key down until after you have clicked either Open or Save from the download file dialog box.
Disable IE7's Adobe Reader add-on through Tools|Manage Add-ons. This will cause Acrobat Reader to be opened as an external application for viewing and printing bar codes and might resolve the issue.
If you are seeing the "To help protect your security, Internet Explorer has blocked this site from downloading files to your computer. Click here for options..." message, choose to "Download File..." from this message's options. Even though this causes Athena to refresh, the next time you open the advance ship notice and click the Print Bar Codes option, it should work. In other words, you'll see this strange behavior once per Athena session, but any bar codes generated after that should open correctly.

Printing Issues

You can print your bar codes using a laser printer or specialized bar code printer. From Athena's preferences (General tab), you can set a default printer for bar codes.

When printing bar codes, it's important that you do not alter their image in any way. There are some common print settings in Adobe Reader that could inadvertently shrink or rotate your bar codes, causing an invalid output. To avoid this, make sure that when you print from Adobe Reader, none of the following options are selected:

The Fit to Page option should be deselected (version 4.0).
The Shrink oversized pages to paper size option should be deselected (version 5.0).
The Expand small pages to paper size option should be deselected (version 5.0).
The Auto-rotate and center pages option should be deselected (version 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, or 8.0).
The value in the Page Scaling field should be set to "None" (version 6.0, 7.0, or 8.0).