"Code 39" or "3 of 9" is by far the most commonly used barcode outside of UPC Symbols. Unless you really like a paticular product, I would recomend using that. It is easy to find the font for free that can be used on your computer. I used
this one for a scanning project I did the other day and it worked great.
One word of caution, most barcodes have leading and trailing characheters so that the barcode reader knows when it is "done" reading. So you could encode with code 39 the word "Stompy" and it would look like this:
but it wouldn't read with any bardcode scanner out there. That is because if you want it to read Stompy it has to be typed as "*Stompy*" like this:
The astericks are the leading and trailing charachers and will make the thing read correctly. You can actually make out the astericks in the lines if you look long enough and once you do that, you can always recognise a code 3 of 9. barcode.