ITF-14 Barcode Generator

What an ITF-14 barcode is

An ITF-14 is the barcode on outer cartons: the brown box of 12 bottles or 24 tins that a shop receives, not the bottle or tin itself, which carries an EAN-13 or a UPC-A. It carries a 14-digit GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) that names that particular pack, so a warehouse can scan a pallet of cartons and know what is inside without opening them. Not sure whether a 14-digit number on a delivery is a GTIN-14 or something else? The barcode identifier tells you.

The symbol is Interleaved 2 of 5, a barcode that only holds digits and stores them in pairs: one digit in the bars and the next in the spaces between them. That makes it compact and tolerant of the rough printing you get on corrugated board, which is why GS1 chose it for cases printed in the box factory.

Building the GTIN-14

A GTIN-14 for a case is built from the retail GTIN of the item inside. Take the first 12 digits of the item's EAN-13, put an indicator digit in front, and calculate a new check digit at the end. The example above is a carton of an item with EAN-13 5400141288766: indicator 1, then 540014128876, then check digit 3. A UPC-A gets a 0 in front first, which turns it into the EAN-13 form of the same number.

Type your item's EAN-13 or UPC-A into this builder and pick an indicator to get the case number:

A carton that holds several different products is a trade item of its own. It gets a new GTIN from your company prefix rather than one built from a product inside, and as 14 digits that number starts with 0. The generator warns about a leading 0 so you can check it is the carton's number and not the retail item's.

Buyers and older documents use other names for the GTIN-14: EAN-14, SCC-14, DUN-14 and UCC-14. A buyer who asks for any of them on a carton wants this barcode with your case's GTIN-14 in it.

Because a 14-digit block interleaves two digits, the diagram brackets whole pairs: the indicator shares its block with the first digit of the inner GTIN, and the check digit shares the last block with the thirteenth digit. To work through a list of cases at once, use the check digit calculator. If a carton label is scuffed and a digit is missing, the barcode repair tool works out GTIN-14s too.

Size, bars and bearer box

At 100% magnification the narrowest bar is 1.016 mm and the data area is 122.43 mm wide, or 142.75 mm with the quiet zones. The GS1 General Specifications allow magnification down to 48.7%, an X-dimension of 0.495 mm. The bars stay 31.75 mm tall at every size; only the width changes. The slider above follows those rules, and the preview shows the size of the whole symbol in millimetres.

US packaging specifications often give the X-dimension in mils, thousandths of an inch: 100% is 40 mil and the minimum is 19.5 mil. Switch the units in Settings to mils or inches and the generator shows sizes the way your spec writes them.

The bearer box

The thick frame is part of the standard. On corrugated board it evens out the pressure of the printing plate, and its top and bottom bars stop a scanner beam that crosses the code at a steep angle from reading a short, wrong barcode. The generator draws the frame touching the bar ends, as GS1 asks, with the 10-module quiet zones inside it. GS1 sets the frame at 4.83 mm thick for plate printing, the same at every magnification, and the generator draws it at 4.83 mm at every size. Labels printed on demand need only bars at the top and bottom, at least 2X thick.

Wide and narrow bars

Interleaved 2 of 5 uses two widths of bar and space. GS1 allows a wide-to-narrow ratio from 2.25 to 3 and targets 2.5, which is what the generator uses. A ratio below 2.25 makes wide and narrow too similar for a scanner to tell apart on rough board.

Where to put it on the case

Put the ITF-14 on a side of the case, not the top, with the bottom of the barcode about 32 mm above the base and at least 19 mm from each vertical edge, quiet zones included. Those are the GS1 targets. A second copy on the next side means a scanner finds one however the cases are stacked on the pallet. Do not put it across a fold or under a flap.

Printing on board or on labels

On corrugated board printed with plates, keep X at 0.635 mm or more and use the full bearer box. Choose the print shop preset in Settings and send the EPS or SVG to the box maker. From an office printer, download the PDF and print it at 100% (actual size), not "fit to page", which shrinks the bars. Print the test page first and measure its 100 mm ruler: if it is shorter than 100 mm, the printer is scaling.

On a thermal label printer you can go smaller. The wide bars are 2.5 times the narrow ones, so the narrow bar needs an even number of printer dots, or the wide bars would fall on half a dot. Choose your printer under Settings and the generator snaps to an even dot count: at 100% on a 203 dpi printer the narrow bar becomes 8 dots (1.001 mm) and the wide bar 20 dots.

For a full set of item and case codes, paste the list into bulk mode. Rows of 14 digits come out as ITF-14 and rows of 13 digits as EAN-13, so the bottles and their cartons print in one go.

ITF-14 or GS1-128?

ITF-14 carries the GTIN of the case and nothing else. When a retailer also needs the batch, the best-before date, the net weight or a serial shipping container code on the carton, that data goes on a GS1-128 label, usually printed on demand and stuck on the box. Many cases carry both: the ITF-14 printed by the box maker and a GS1-128 label added at packing.

Pallets are different again. A pallet gets a GS1 logistic label with an SSCC, the 18-digit serial shipping container code, on two adjacent sides; the ITF-14s on its cases stay as they are. To check the data on a GS1-128 label, use the GS1-128 parser, or the bulk GS1-128 parser for many labels at once.

Frequently asked questions