barcode generation

[Jean-Pierre A. Radley]

I'd thought that the printing of barcodes required either specialized
label printers, or more generally, barcode fonts ($$$) downloaded to
laser printers.   Not necessarily. :-)

I highly recommend this gem:

	Barcode Writer in Pure PostScript
	http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/

It's not only free, but liberally licensed:

        "Anybody is free to use and develop this code as they see fit,
        under the terms of the permissive MIT/X-Consortium License."

This generator is written entirely in PostScript, and knows two dozen
standard barcode encodings.  Size and positioning on the output page are
easily manipulated, the code-text itself can be included or dropped, and
the barcode can even appear in glorious color.

I design a filePro form (which can include ASCII line-drawing) with
space for the barcode, convert filePro's output to PostScript using pcl6
(which we've discussed here several times), then merge the PostScript
from filePro with the PostScript for barcodes.

If the printer won't handle PostScript directly, I use ghostscript.

There's a tarball of pcl6 for OSR 5|6 at ftp.jpr.com/pub, massaged
to use /usr/local/fonts, instead of the pcl6 source code default of
/windows/fonts (ugh!).

-- 
JP
	==> http://www.frappr.com/cusm <==