I agree. An additional consideration might be for assemblies, if the
company’s GTIN prefix is known, barcodes could be automatically
generated or verified.
That’s a good idea Nathan.
one that was PHP, and would do EAN-13. I took a quick look around
this morning and discovered zint (http://www.zint.org.uk) which is a C
program with a CLI that might work. I’m not sure why I didn’t find it
before…
It supports a lot of formats, and I invite comments on replacing the
un-maintained PEAR library with zint.
I think it will have to be replaced if PEAR is no longer being maintained and simply doesn’t support industry standard barcodes that will be required to allow pERP to compete with the likes of SAP. I had a look at Zint earlier and it does seem very fully functional and mature.
However, using the online generator they provide, the following will
not generate:
The web interface at http://www.barcode-generator.org/ doesn’t produce the barcodes you mentioned, but this seems to be errors on that site rather than the Zint library. For example, when selecting Code-3/9 it lets me know $ is a valid character but complains when I type it, and a space is a valid character in this format also but it doesn’t like that. I suspect the library itself would get such things right especially if its capability allows the generation of much more complex barcodes. This is probably the website authors fault.
If you look at the comparison page http://www.zint.org.uk/zintSite/Comparison.aspx you will see at the bottom it supports all the GS-1 code schema’s (which includes all the GTIN formats in my original email) so I think this is a good sign that they will get that sort of thing correct in the library itself.
I don’t have a scanner available any more, so I can’t verify the
generated codes.
http://www.onlinebarcodereader.com/ seems to be from the same author as the generator using Zint, see if it works. Alternatively the GOCR optical character recognition package on Linux can also read some common barcodes.
I’m happy to have someone around that actually knows something about
this stuff. The main obstacle to barcodes in pERP is finding a good
OSS library to handle generation. The last time I swapped out the
barcode generator, I put in a bit of abstraction so changes shouldn’t
be too bad, no matter what changes are needed. I don’t have any
preferences other than to prefer PHP, but if PEAR isn’t doing it, it
needs to be changed.
Well ideally a PHP library would be easiest, but let us not forget that PHP is just C and most the extensions are also just C libraries with PHP bindings. I’ve contributed bits to PHP and know that creating bindings isn’t that difficult. But at the same time let’s not forget that pERP uses other binaries directly, like (un)zip. Additionally, using a binary would probably make it easier for Windows users to also get this functionality working if there isn’t yet a click-install easy PEAR extension for their learned little minds.
It may be worth putting it to the authors of Zint that as the PEAR barcode library is unmaintained, they may very well like to create a competing PEAR package. PHP has no small audience, so I’m sure their work would be well utilised.
Anyway, it seems as though others are working on such a thing judging from these comments on their site:
“Wrappers
Some people have been good enough to provide wrappers to use the Zint library in other languages. I currently have code for C++, Delphi and PHP but haven’t yet had the chance to properly look at this code or add it to the project. If you are looking for this functionality then please contact me and I will be happy to forward what I have. I hope to be able to add this code to the project this year.”
Zint seems to be a good find and certainly has my thumbs-up.
Paul
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