Bar Code Labeling Software

I guess that GNU Barcode [1] and Perl's Barcode::Code128 [2] may be worth a look.

Usually, I'd use LaTeX for such a task (along with some Shell scriptery, etc.), even if it's (quite) a bit of an overkill. However, I believe that any general purpose barcode generator out there now has an option to produce PNGs, which could then be imported into whatever page layout software used.

My Brother P-Touch label-maker supports 19 different bar-code protocols (built into the free P-Touch software)...

Spits out a tape, peel off the backing and stick. ...Jim Thompson

Not sure it's relevant.

We needed to add labels with barcode and MAC numbers to one of our products.

We bought a SATO CX pr> I decided to cross post this to c.a.e

Thanks for the links. I need to ship this tomorrow so I don't have time to learn a bunch of stuff. I went to Office Depot and the clerk seemed like a reasonable fellow, but didn't really know anything about what software might print barcodes.

The cpan.org page has an "online" barcode generator that uses jquery. The page looks great, but I can't figure out how to get the image. Right clicking doesn't give an option to save the image even though there are four choices for the image format. I was even able to get the page to work offline by saving it on my hard drive, but still no image file. I wish I could get Firefox to run, but it seems to crap out on my system these days. I can always get an image on a webpage from FF.

Any suggestions? Am I missing something obvious?

This seems to be working out. I won't get a chance to scan it, but I have added the font and gotten it to work in a spread sheet. Now I just need to format the labels on forms and buy sheets the to print them on.

Thanks!

Perhaps a silly answer but have you tried [CTRL]-PrintScreen and pasted into something like MS Paint?

Select the desired area in Paint and save to the desired image format.

If necessary, first make the image bigger in the web-browser using [CTRL}-MouseScrollButton?

Yes, I could do that, but I found another way. Turns out the wiki page on Code128 has some links at the bottom of the page for sources of code and tools. One of them led me to a font package with an Excel macro that does *exactly* what I need. Type the info into one cell and the barcode shows up in another cell. Size each of the cells appropriately and adjust the font size of the bar code and Bob's your uncle!

I had to trust the author since this uses a macro which could have been a virus. I scanned it first, but I don't know how well AVS works to find BASIC coded viruses in macros. But he said he it wasn't a virus, and I'm sure he wouldn't lie... lol.

CodeSoft label software by TekLynx

So much of this depends on the context. From the mention of OpenOffice I assume that this is a one-off hand-assembled document rather than programmatic ouput from a DB or whatever. I've only had an occasional use for that and I've always found a suitable web-based generator to paste in from, e.g.

Formatted printed output from programs generally means Postscript in any event (for a Unix shop at least ;-) ), so inserting a barcode generation function in the header and then calling it with the right options later is no big hassle. I wrote a Postscript EAN-13 generator a few years back - it only took about an hour and I'm far from a Postscript expert, but I notice the same author as above has a far more comprehensive library at

GNU barcode writes EPS, as well as other formats.

HTH, Klaus

Even given that the majority of barcodes (and non-bar codes, such as the QR code) are essentially raster? (Well, except the alphanumeric label, if any.)

Yet, I cannot refrain from reminding that PostScript is /not/ a format, but a fully-featured programming language (which has certain implications on its own.) Surely, I'd prefer to handle a format which I can parse, instead of one I have to /execute/. (Generally, that'd mean either PDF or SVG, although the support for either seem to be falling behind that for PostScript.)

Yes, a two off actually, two labels and they will need to be updated for the specific shipment, date, PO number, ect. I like using a spread sheet for this sort of thing since both the positioning of the fields is easy and it provides data functions. I found an Excel macro online. I just looked at the page you provided and the bar codes from the two sources don't seem to agree. I need to find a third source to verify which is right... unless I end up with three different outputs of the same thing! lol

I just don't have the time to deal with bar codes any more for now. I have to get the rest of the paperwork in order. Exports are a PITA.

Thanks for the links!

Yes - I've had too many problems with bitmap barcodes in the past. It seems the biggest problem is that most printers seem to see a raster image and assume it's fair game for dithering. "Dotty" barcodes don't scan very well.

It's horses for courses. Personally I view that programmability as its greatest strength - it means you can draft a standard job header containing the relevant functions and from then on the job-specific stuff is high-level stuff that reflects both the logical layout of the job and the internal layout of the program doing the generation.

Since the issue here is barcodes consider drawing one "manually". You'll have a sequence of commands :

Go to x1,y1 Define box width x2 height y2 Fill with black. Go to x3,y3 Define box width x4 height y4 Fill with black...

(1234567890123) ean13

Of course you can argue that the complexity is simply shifted but it always seems a _lot_ cleaner to me to put the smarts in the job itself as opposed to the program - it saves "bitty" I/O for one thing and expresses the complex stuff in a language designed for the task at hand.

barcodes have integer-width stripes, this layout fits well with bitmaps if the scale factor is an integer. Bitmaps will oftem be more space-efficient than vector formats, especially if the bitmap format allows non-square pixels,

Yes, that's what I wanted to say. However, there's indeed an issue with various software packages, which apply interpolation on scaling by default. Which means that the image gets the blur, the shades, and, finally, the dithering that was observed. And, frankly, while searching for an option to disable such interpolation for raster graphics may be an endeavor on its own, this whole issue rarely arises when using vector graphics.

... And as long as one embeds the raster in question into a vector image, this will almost always be easy to achieve.

I used gnu barcode and awk to create a unix printer interface which would produce barcode labels for a POS system I did some years back. This worked very well, and while I'm not sure why you would want to parse the output (postscript) rather than simply print it, I would +1 for gnu barcode ... it just worked for me.

Cheers, Rob.

I'm not sure what you are saying. The label I need has a number of fields with a value and a barcode for each one. I ended up arranging it in a reasonably easy to read format that fits on a standard label sheet. I formated the Excel barcodes into labels arranged the labels on a page and print them out when needed.

I've have yet to verify that the barcodes are actually readable though... lol I hope they aren't giving my customer fits. I'm sure I wouldn't hear about it either way.