USPS IMpb

US Postal Service Intelligent Mail Package Barcodes (USPS IMpb) are used by the United States postal service for parcel deliveries. They contain parcel destination information along with other information about the delivery. They are one of the barcode types that can be added to a template; see Barcode.
In PlanetPress Connect versions prior to 2019.2 this barcode was called "IMPB".

The barcode can be added either using the Barcode toolbar button or through selecting Insert > Barcode on the menu; see Adding a barcode.

To change a barcode's properties, such as the scale and color, open the Barcode properties dialog: right-click the barcode (on the Design tab in the Workspace) and select the Barcode... option in the context menu.

Note that this type of barcode processes tilde characters (~) in the data as special characters. See the Java4less Barcodes Guide to learn what the tilde character can be used for.

This topic lists the output options of the USPS IMpb barcode type. For the properties of other barcode types, see Barcode type and properties.

Note: Application Identifiers in the barcode value need to be surrounded by round brackets, otherwise the barcode will not be generated correctly.
For example, this value contains both a Postal Code Application Identifier (420) and a Channel Application Identifier 93: 420123459302234567890123456788. It should be written as follows: (420)12345(93)02234567890123456788.
More information about Application Identifiers can be found in the barcode specification here: https://postalpro.usps.com/shipping/impb/BarcodePackageIMSpec

Barcode output

Color

The Color group allows you to choose a different Barcode color (instead of black) and Background color (instead of white), by typing a hexadecimal color value (see for example w3school's color picker).

When black is a composite of CMYK or RGB values, it may incur a color click charge on some printers. Check the Output in Grayscale option to make sure that pure black is used.

Output format

Defines how the barcode is output on the page. There are two possible formats:

  • SVG: Vector format. This is usually of higher quality, but may take longer to generate and is not compatible with Email output.

  • PNG: Binary rasterized format. This has a slightly lower quality than SVG but is usually generated faster and will display properly in Email output.