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).
alex_suzuki 11 hours ago [-]
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.
tfpgh 34 minutes ago [-]
This is amazing!
pwdisswordfishs 9 hours ago [-]
Aside from obfuscating the source code to sell licenses, how does this benefit from WASM?
Barcodes have been generated for decades on low-resource embedded devices. Even what would have been a modest-to-low-end machine 25 years ago would have no problem handling the compute needed for this job.
On this end, it just looks like the user has to deal with the penalty of dealing with 1 MB of resources when hitting the main page.
alex_suzuki 8 hours ago [-]
The benefit of WASM in this case is that you can wrap a mature library written in C/C++ (in this case, Zint), and run it in a runtime that supports WASM, e.g. the browser. There's plenty of people who occasionally need to create barcodes, and not in some industrial, automated way, and a browser is just an easy way to accomplish that. Yes, you have 1MB loaded when you load the page, but hopefully that will be served from a cache.
nolroz 4 hours ago [-]
One MEGAbyte?? How could you!?
mark-r 9 hours ago [-]
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.
darksim905 2 hours ago [-]
'font' cartridge? the what now?
EvanAnderson 2 hours ago [-]
You're one of today's lucky 10,000.
Like another poster said, laser printers "back in the day" were freestanding computers with various communications interfaces that happened to have fancy paper handling and printing peripherals attached. In the case of the Apple LaserWriter, for example, it was arguably a more powerful computer[0] than the Mac machines of the day that were sending print jobs to it.
There were different ROM "personalities" available for laser printers, some of which came on pluggable cartridges.
Michael Steil, the blogger responsible for those links, has done work extracting code and PostScript data out of some of those old cartridges. It's a really cool aspect of retrocomputing many people aren't even aware of.
In the dark ages, when printers were PostScript and more powerful (and expensive) than the computers which printed on them, you added fonts by installing additional hardware modules, similar to a game console cartridge.
xp84 58 minutes ago [-]
Up until like 15 years ago, lots of laser printers even had RAM slots as well. Populating them with extra RAM made them behave better when printing big PDFs and stuff.
wildzzz 2 hours ago [-]
They were ROM cards that stored extra typefaces or other PostScript functions.
1bpp 16 hours ago [-]
Is anyone willing to sacrifice their sanity for the sake of implementing a QR renderer as TTF hinting code?
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 :)
You all know this is the answer. In fact you will do this and then post it on Show HN proudly.
dspillett 11 hours ago [-]
The downvotes aren't saying the comment is wrong (though it might be), they are saying “if it is that easy, you ask Claude”. The parent comment seemed to be specifically asking if a person would work on it, not specifying what tools might be used in that work.
ahlCVA 11 hours ago [-]
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.
alex_suzuki 11 hours ago [-]
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.
ahlCVA 10 hours ago [-]
It seems like it doesn't do this for Code 128 (possibly because it is variable-width?). It definitely works with EAN13 though - I tried it locally using only the TTF file.
alex_suzuki 10 hours ago [-]
Oh, interesting! I tried it in Word on macOS but didn't get it to work. But it works in the browser (question mark = calculates check digit).
fyi code 39 barcodes are outdated because of the lack of check sums and leads to false positives.
infogulch 6 hours ago [-]
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].
It's not clear to me how can I put FNC3 and the beginning of the Code 128 bar code.
muhammadusman 5 hours ago [-]
just curious: are barcodes better in anyway compared to a QR code?
dimatura 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
wps 4 hours ago [-]
I believe they are much faster to scan, as you don’t need to identify the corners.
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)
"
Marelle is a free cursive police force for teaching writing in elementary school.
Introduction
This project is supported by the Digital Directorate for Education of the Ministry of National Education, and developed in the Forge of Digital Educational Commons.
The Marelle police is designed specifically for teaching cursive writing in elementary school, it was developed by a team of teachers and designers specialized in writing systems.
Teaching Cursive Writing
Structure and sequence of letters, rhythm and proportion, contextual variants: the Marelle font was thought around specific criteria to offer a quality model to teachers and students.
Particular attention has been paid to the trace of numbers, capital letters and punctuation.
A complete professional tool
The Marelle police offers 3 types of variants:
uppercase sticks or cursive
with or without lineage Seyes
height of ascendants and descendants
These variants can be combined to best meet the needs of teachers and students." etc
albert_e 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks!
(the first line made me laugh)
I now understand why there is no English version (though still surprised Google could not translate it)
jurgemaister 12 hours ago [-]
> cursive police force
bombcar 9 hours ago [-]
I know I've often cursive'd the police.
ligne 10 hours ago [-]
Homographs are tricky :-)
piltboy 13 hours ago [-]
"Marelle is a free cursive font designed for teaching handwriting in [French] elementary school."
I'm not sure they owe it to anyone to make the website available in English :-)
albert_e 3 hours ago [-]
That there is not much use for an english version -- is only evident to me with hindsight after reading the english translation :)
Thanks
tokai 9 hours ago [-]
ooh thanks, the Bâton in capital letter is very nice.
tecleandor 11 hours ago [-]
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.
endre 15 hours ago [-]
this is genius
alex_suzuki 11 hours ago [-]
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.
nemoniac 13 hours ago [-]
ASCII only?
Terr_ 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ale42 13 hours ago [-]
Code 128 supports some ISO-8859-1 indeed, but it requires switching between encodings (there are 3 of them), and couldn't work with 128B (I guess the one used by the font, as it supports ASCII). See the table on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_128
trashb 11 hours ago [-]
actually it seems they support 128A 128B and 128C with the correct encoder.
To use these fonts you have to use an encoder like the one below. It is an optimizing encoder, that means, it produces the shortest barcode that can encode the input. For this the encoder, if necessary or shorter, switches between the three available Code Sets (list from Wikipedia):
Even with plain ASCII we sometime struggle with the various scanners, as they emulate keyboards. So for instance using : in the barcode as a separator of values becomes wonky if the OS has a different input language than expected.
ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago [-]
Very nice.
Now, do it with QR codes...
dmitrygr 16 hours ago [-]
This is a perversion of the most sickening nature. Nicely done!
breakingcups 14 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised at this reaction, this has been standard practice for many years in various companies where I worked.
dfox 11 hours ago [-]
The fact that this is standard practice does not mean that it is not perverse. It kind of works sanely for plain Code39 (and even then you will see effects of doing that in weird places, like VAG stamping human readable VIN on a chassis, including the Code39 start/stop symbols), once you start using barcode fonts for Code128-derived symbologies (ie. UPC/EAN) the whole thing becomes a pointless exercise.
Dwedit 9 hours ago [-]
I mean there was already the Bad Apple font (keep adding another character to your text and you get the next video frame)
9 hours ago [-]
endre 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 21:22:37 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
Barcodes have been generated for decades on low-resource embedded devices. Even what would have been a modest-to-low-end machine 25 years ago would have no problem handling the compute needed for this job.
On this end, it just looks like the user has to deal with the penalty of dealing with 1 MB of resources when hitting the main page.
Like another poster said, laser printers "back in the day" were freestanding computers with various communications interfaces that happened to have fancy paper handling and printing peripherals attached. In the case of the Apple LaserWriter, for example, it was arguably a more powerful computer[0] than the Mac machines of the day that were sending print jobs to it.
There were different ROM "personalities" available for laser printers, some of which came on pluggable cartridges.
Check these links out:
- https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1673
- https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1721
- https://www.pagetable.com/?p=1850
Michael Steil, the blogger responsible for those links, has done work extracting code and PostScript data out of some of those old cartridges. It's a really cool aspect of retrocomputing many people aren't even aware of.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20240404213221/https://lowendmac...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms1Drb9Vw9M
It uses this, which i have no idea what it is :-) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/f...
[1]: https://github.com/lindell/JsBarcode
[2]: https://codepen.io/infogulch/pen/yyLJdrP
Another cool font, but less original, I stumbled upon recently is Marelle https://marelle.forge.apps.education.fr/ for cursive.
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?
" Marelle is a free cursive police force for teaching writing in elementary school. Introduction
This project is supported by the Digital Directorate for Education of the Ministry of National Education, and developed in the Forge of Digital Educational Commons.
The Marelle police is designed specifically for teaching cursive writing in elementary school, it was developed by a team of teachers and designers specialized in writing systems.
Teaching Cursive Writing
Structure and sequence of letters, rhythm and proportion, contextual variants: the Marelle font was thought around specific criteria to offer a quality model to teachers and students. Particular attention has been paid to the trace of numbers, capital letters and punctuation. A complete professional tool
The Marelle police offers 3 types of variants:
These variants can be combined to best meet the needs of teachers and students." etc(the first line made me laugh)
I now understand why there is no English version (though still surprised Google could not translate it)
I'm not sure they owe it to anyone to make the website available in English :-)
Thanks
It looks like Code 128 could potentially handle some ISO-8859-1 accented latin characters, but I'm not sure how to test it.
Now, do it with QR codes...