Bar Width Reduction (BWR)
Bar width reduction is the deliberate thinning of printed bars — specified in microns or thousandths of an inch — to compensate for ink spread in printing processes.
What You Need to Know
Inkjet, flexographic, and offset printing all broaden bars slightly as ink bleeds into the substrate: a bar that is exactly 0.33 mm in the artwork may print at 0.35 mm. Because spaces are what typically erode first, accumulated growth shifts every element ratio and eventually breaks decoding. BWR pre-compensates by making the bars in the source artwork slightly narrower, so the printed result lands on target.
BWR is applied per print channel, not per symbology: the same artwork may need 5% reduction on an inkjet line and none on a laser printer. Professional label software exposes BWR as a micrometer value (e.g. 20 µm). If you generate a barcode online and outsource the label printing, ask the print shop whether their equipment expects bar-width reduction — supplying a raw SVG usually lets their prepress apply the correct compensation.
Where Bar Width Reduction (BWR) Applies
A high-density, variable-length linear barcode that encodes all 128 ASCII characters, and the backbone symbology of modern logistics.
Generate Code 128 →The 13-digit retail point-of-sale barcode used on consumer products worldwide outside North America.
Generate EAN-13 →The GTIN-14 carton-level barcode: ITF with thick bearer bars, printed directly on corrugated shipping cases.
Generate ITF-14 →The classic self-checking alphanumeric barcode: 43 characters, simple structure, still everywhere in industry.
Generate Code 39 →