The reason I’m asking this is the company I work for develops an application which has a barcode reader functionality. The device we develop these softwares for has a very limited resolution camera (2MP). Now they want me to set a benchmark for the maximum length barcode pattern which is scannable. So what I’m trying to do is use an online barcode generator of CODE-128 and then feed various length strings to it. If I knew what pattern results in the most dense/unreadable barcode I’d be able to create different patterns using that.
I also don’t know much about barcodes other than what I just read in the Wikipedia article, but my assumption would be you could find a bunch of characters with the most 1 widths (they will all add up to 11 though). For extra points you could calculate the check digit and make it ‘hard to read’ too.