Printing Barcodes from webapp?

[John J. Lee]

"Andy Dingley" <dingbat at codesmiths.com> writes:

> Burhan wrote:
> 
> >   Is there an easy way to generate barcodes using Python
> 
> Easy way for any application or language to generate barcodes is to
> install a barcode font on the client machine, then just generate a
> suitable text string for it. This is _very_ easy, if you can get the
> font deployed.  I usually find myself using Code 39 and printing them
> from a HTML document. There are plenty of free code 39 fonts around and
> the string mangling to get the barcode structured correctly is just a
> trivial prefix / suffix.

Sometimes that's really convenient.  Depending on the barcode, this
may not always be easy, though.  Certainly there are some
complications, ranging from things like relatively simple check
digits, through complicated encodings (my colleague Robin tells me US
postal bar codes were a particular pain), up to funny-looking 2D "bar"
codes like PDF417, that have lots of complicated rules associated with
them.

The ReportLab open source toolkit barcode support handles this kind of
thing for you -- for the barcodes it supports, anyway.


John