[TriLUG] back to barcodes

Brian Henning brian at strutmasters.com
Thu Jul 8 10:23:45 EDT 2004


Just for the record, PHP does indeed have a graphics library similar, I
believe, to the GD perl module.  Or you could just use the Perl GD library.
As I'm sure you know, incorporating script-generated images into web pages
is as simple as
[img src="script.php?typical_url_encoded_arguments=like_this..."]
or ..src="script.pl", although I don't know if you can pass arguments in the
same way (probably, if your perl script knows how to handle http get/post
vars).  Your script will simply need to be created such that it spits out
its image data (and nothing else) to stdout (for example, in PHP libgd,
calling imagejpeg($image_) will output JPEG data for $image [$image being an
image created with the libgd functions] to the standard output stream).

Hope this is the slightest bit informative. :-)

Cheers,
~B

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Greg Brown" <gregbrown at mindspring.com>
To: "Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list" <trilug at trilug.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2004 10:06 AM
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] back to barcodes


> 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.
>
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>





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