To find a sample of Interleaved 2 of 5, check out the corrugated boxes in which things are shipped to the grocery store. It is also well used within the warehousing industry for identification purposes. The Distribution Symbology Study Group has recommended 2 of 5 as the standard for numeric labeling of corrugated shipping containers. It has also been adopted by the Uniform Product Code Council as the standard symbology for outer shipping containers in the grocery industry. Interleaved 2 of 5 code characters are composed of five elements, two wide and three narrow.
Characters are encodedinto both bars and spaces.
The odd positions are encoded into bars and even positions into spaces. Figure 1 is an example of the number 3852 encoded into 2 of 5 symbology. The three is encoded into the first five bars after the start character and the eight is in the first five spaces after the start character. This allows the characters to overlap and creates a higher density code. An item to note with respect to the 2 of 5 symbology is that the number of digits in the bar code must be even.