Recently, I needed a bunch of EPS files for EAN-13 barcodes (that’s the kind of barcodes European companies put on their products).
Terry Burton wrote a great barcode writer in pure PostScript for this, with a simple web front end to generate a barcode one at a time.
Actually, his tool can:
- Generate all kinds of 1D and 2D barcodes (EAN-5, -8, -13, Code 128, Code 39, Code 93, Data Matrix, GS1, ISBN and many may more)
- Generate the check digits where needed
Since most DTP packages favour EPS over PS, and I needed more than just a few of them, I went a bit beyond the one-at-a-time simple web front end.
In fact, the EPS file generated by Terry Burton’s web front end has just one variable: the article number.
Basically, there are two ways go generate a whole bunch of the barcode EPS files:
- Grab one EPS file from his site and search/replace the article number in it (do! it’s easy, read on)
- Encode the parameters in the URL on his web-site, and extract the link to the (random location of the) EPS file, then download the EPS file (don’t! costs a lot of time and burdens his web-server)
Let’s see how easy 1. is… Read the rest of this entry »
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