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- Hacker News
- Very nice.
Now, do it with QR codes...
- ASCII only?by nemoniac
- More or less, AFAICT the underlying barcode standards don't support Unicode, if that's what you mean.
It looks like Code 128 could potentially handle some ISO-8859-1 accented latin characters, but I'm not sure how to test it.
by Terr_ - just curious: are barcodes better in anyway compared to a QR code?
- I believe they are much faster to scan, as you don’t need to identify the corners.by wps
- They are simpler and can be read by more devices, especially legacy devices that are still pretty widely deployed. Other than that, not much to say in their favor. They have lower data density compared to 2D codes such as QR or datamatrix. Many linear barcode symbologies have weak or nonexistent error correction capability. But often you don't need that extra data, and the cost of changing processes and equipment to upgrade to a new barcode format is seen as not worth it.by dimatura
- This is a perversion of the most sickening nature. Nicely done!by dmitrygr
- I mean there was already the Bad Apple font (keep adding another character to your text and you get the next video frame)by Dwedit
- I'm surprised at this reaction, this has been standard practice for many years in various companies where I worked.by breakingcups
- It's not clear to me how can I put FNC3 and the beginning of the Code 128 bar code.by ciupicri
- Damn, yes please.
Another cool font, but less original, I stumbled upon recently is Marelle https://marelle.forge.apps.education.fr/ for cursive.
by utopiah - this is geniusby endre
- Nice! That looks pretty similar to the one in "Cuadernos Rubio", a system that was super popular from the 60s to the 90s in Spain (that still exists) for learning handwriting in primary school.by tecleandor
- Love it. Flashbacks to CE1 and CE2 (2nd and 3rd grade in the US system) in a French embassy school, simultaneously handling "immersion in real french", "using a fountain pen for the first time", "different long division" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_division#Eurasia) and "different cursive" (I think the method I was coming from was D'Nealian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian)by mos_basik
- > https://marelle.forge.apps.education.fr/
This website is in French so I was unable tounderstand the text
and the website is very resistant to automatic translation by Google Translate
>https://marelle-forge-apps-education-fr.translate.goog/?_x_t...
What gives?
by albert_e - This would be more interesting if you wouldn’t need to calculate checksums yourself, and could just write the barcode value. Good luck doing that with something like Reed-Solomon (QR, Data Matrix, etc.) or the shenanigans they’re doing with GS1 DataBar.by alex_suzuki
- Neat! Barcodes are much more complex that I knew before looking into it. I used JsBarcode [1] to create a special barcode that reprograms a cheap barcode scanner we got on Amazon to be able to scan both UPS and FedEx tracking numbers. It is published on CodePen [2].by infogulch
- fyi code 39 barcodes are outdated because of the lack of check sums and leads to false positives.by joewhale
- Barcode fonts have been around for ages. But what's cute about this one is that it can calculate the EAN13 checksum on its own.by ahlCVA
- It can’t, at least for Code 128? There’s a text field that you enter the text into, and then the start/stop/checksum characters are computed.by alex_suzuki
- Is anyone willing to sacrifice their sanity for the sake of implementing a QR renderer as TTF hinting code?by 1bpp
- I love seeing nonsense like that. How that work graphically though? Just keep adding to a same QR code that keeps getting denser as more text is added? I guess it doesn't have to practical though :)
- by foodevl
Harfbuzz now has WASM interpreter for a shaper. You can make pretty much arbitrary programs in fonts now.- https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/ - https://github.com/bjia56/translate.ttf - https://github.com/hsfzxjy/handwriter.ttfby ValdikSS- Do not do this unless you do not have any other choice. Preferrably use whatever native barcode support of the printer involved, if it does not have that, just generate the barcode as vector image or bitmap with a resolution that is a integer fraction of the printers resolution. Generating correct Code128 as a SVG is about the same amount of work as generating the correct input for some sort of barcode font (the hard part is determining the switches between character sets, not generating bars from bytes).by dfox
- You have given me the encouragement I needed...
Recently I put some 8-bit graphics in SVG using lines and stroke dash arrays. I also got them animated, in a space efficient way, by keeping the lines that do not change from frame to frame. (I now have Maria and Willy from 'Jet Set Willy' for the wait after a form is submitted, plus a few Space Invaders. I am resisting the urge to do Pac-Man ghosts, but I will invent a need for them...)
Since an SVG can be a mystery box full of CSS, SMIL, Javascript and 'foreign object' imports, I am tempted to give it a go, so that a CSS variable is passed to the depths of the shadow DOM in a URL fragment or query string, to magically return either a barcode or a QR code.
This will take a little while, but I am keen to give it a go. In some ways, SVG is like 'Duplo LEGO' with the Libre Barcode as a font more like 'LEGO Technik', requiring vastly more skill.
Just because you can doesn't mean that you should, plus there are many barcode libraries that I know well, so why reinvent the wheel?
The typical barcode library usually comes with fluff, formats and libraries that I don't need. Hence 'qr.svg#upc-number' with it just being one file has appeal.
I am not yet up to speed on the latest AI toys, however, given the problem space is well defined, could I just ask AI chat bot to churn out the code for this in a matter of seconds, for it to encapsulate the logic in an SVG? Would it know how to specify 'crisp edges' and what the deal is with aspect ratio?
Similarly, could I also ask the AI nicely to create my own barcode font?
These seem manageable problems for todays trillion-dollar wonder tech, it is not as if I am asking for a cure for cancer or anything hard, yet I lack confidence in an AI solution, and feel I might as well work it out myself, given my goal is learning SVG rather than prompting.
My lack of confidence is the AI solution is due to the scarcity of people writing online about doing cool things with CSS variables, URL fragments and code in SVG. A Google search does not show 'stroke dash array' things for QR codes and online QR code generators create lots of fully fledged rect-angles, that lack the space efficiency or human-readability of my prefered approach, even if gzip doesn't care.
Sorry for bringing AI into everything, I just have my doubts that the new toys are that capable when it comes to novel solutions.
by Theodores - I'm sorry, after reading your comment several times I still don't understand why we shouldn't use this. What is the problem with it?by OrangeMusic
- I did exactly that ( bitmap ) for a retail application back in ~2000. It was just a couple of constants for the stop and start sigils plus an array of bits for the digits....it was a quick work.by jpitz
- I once worked at a company that used a Code39 font cartridge in HP Laserjets. When HP stopped putting font cartridge slots in their printers, I had the task of intercepting print jobs and detecting the font selection sequence, then taking the text and converting it to a Code128 bitmap graphic. It wasn't hard at all, kind of fun actually.by mark-r
- Shameless plug for my web-based Zint frontend: https://barcode.new (in-browser WASM)
I wrote it specifically because most online barcode generators don’t support vector output or suck in some other way: ads, signup necessary, code payload exposed to server-side processing etc.
by alex_suzuki