Abstract: An impact printing device for printing postal bar code patterns on an information carrier. The patterns are a combination of parallel tall and short bars separated by spaces. The type elements are attached to a movable type carrier, each element comprised of pairs of vertical bars having different stroke lengths but equal widths. Additionally these elements contain overscored and/or underscored horizontal bars, that when printed appear outside the postal bar code clear space. This produces print elements that have nearly equal area and in turn produce printed characters of uniform stroke widths that are easily read by the U.S. Postal Service electronic readers.