[TriLUG] back to barcodes

[Greg Brown]

Bah!  Postscript?   I know NOTHING of postscript.

Anyway, here are some examples of the output I have to create:

http://tbcorp.homeip.net/brown.net/greg/barcode/

The pictures are pretty crappy, but you can see the general layout.  I 
was playing around with some barcode stuff on-line and it appears that 
I'm going to have to use Code-128b, whatever that is.

Anyway, basically the barcode reads the same as the case number which 
is the big colorful number to the left of the actual barcode.  Each 
number in the numeric code has a color that represents that same number 
(or letter).  Thankfully the codes area fixed lenght... the other 
information (patient name, drug name, etc) are all extracted from the 
massive oracle database and is keyed off that same code.

The database part is a snap.  This postscript madness is not, at least 
for me.

My google search is on for postscript how-tos.  If anyone knows of a 
good book, or just wants to teach me how to do this in exchange for 
karma or money.. well, name your price.  I have to produce this exact 
output, though and there should be seven stickers per page.  Oh, and I 
have to produce this output via a script,  all done from a PHP 
front-end website.  I can use PERL to generate the barcodes, or do 
whatever, but in the end I need to show the user on the screen via the 
webpage how everything is going to look when it's printed out.  Heck, I 
could use PHP to generate the images if that's possible, but I don't 
think it is.

Any takers?

Greg

On Wednesday, Jul 7, 2004, at 23:44 US/Eastern, Brent Verner wrote:

>
> If all you have to do is print the barcode, this will help.
>   http://www.gnu.org/software/barcode/
> If you have to layout the color blocks and other stuff for
> printing, enjoy Postscript!!!  Wait, you might be better
> off using Perl GD::Barcode::* to create the desired image
> then convert that image to Postscript with pngtopnm | pnmtops.