Hi all, Is anyone using barcode printing on a production system? I recently tried to get them working and although I can get it to produce barcodes there are two problems: 1. The file that's exported has an extension of .pl ... this means that most OSes can't determine that it's a PDF by default. What's the best way to export it as a useful filename and extension? 2. The barcodes that are generated have leading zeros and one zero after the barcode. So they're almost right, but in their current form aren't really useful (don't scan correctly). Anyone else experiencing the same problems? Any solutions out there? Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS
There are at the very least potential Koha users who want to use barcode generation. I have not experimented with actually using the barcode generation in Koha, myself. PREVIOUS DISCUSSION There was a conversation between owen and tim on #koha on 5 August 2005 about trying to use the barcode generator. tim seemed to have misidentified the script being called to actually generate the barcodes in referring to them as code 39, or 3 of 9. I followed his example later that night without looking at the code calling the correct script. There is in fact an old script in /intranet/scripts/misc/barcodes.pl for generating much simpler code 39 barcodes. CODE INTERPRETATION The script integrated into the Koha intranet is supposed to generate code 128 barcodes. Vault Information Services. Code 128 symbology. barcodeisland.com . http://www.barcodeisland.com/code128.phtml A useful page for understanding code 128. You might check as to whether your scanner is reading code 128 barcodes correctly. Although, it should really fail absolutely instead of giving an erroneous string. One possibility is from an online form. Carl A Sewell. Create code 128 bar code. http://home.hiwaay.net/%7Ecsewell/CreateCode128.shtml. Otherwise, try using the module used for Koha barcode generation directly. There is probably enough documentation for PDF::API to quickly determine how to generate barcodes with the module outside of Koha to use for testing. Alfred Reibenschuh. PDF::API2. http://search.cpan.org/~areibens/PDF-API2-0.45/lib/PDF/API2.pm . LIKELY PROBLEM A leading '00' would most likely be from setting the country code to USA in the template. A trailing '0' would most likely be the check digit. It would seem that something is missing or not being interpreted correctly for using that code in Koha. The intended design may be either to have the scanner not return the check digit after validating the code or some missing script is supposed to interpret the check digit in addition to the country code. PEOPLE WHO REALLY KNOW The email addresses of Veleda Matias and Castañeda Sebastian from Physics Library UNLP, Argentina, authors of the barcode generation component, are given at the top of the files such as /intranet/barcodes/barcodes.pl . A year after the barcode component was contributed it ought to be working. I would suggest contacting them to ask how the component is implemented on their system and how they actually make use of the country codes. I expect that I would use this code if it were working well and could be easily adapted to my required workflow. Thomas D Quoting Joshua Ferraro <jmf@liblime.com> :
---------------- Beginning of the original message ------------------
Hi all,
Is anyone using barcode printing on a production system? I recently tried to get them working and although I can get it to produce barcodes there are two problems:
1. The file that's exported has an extension of .pl ... this means that most OSes can't determine that it's a PDF by default. What's the best way to export it as a useful filename and extension?
2. The barcodes that are generated have leading zeros and one zero after the barcode. So they're almost right, but in their current form aren't really useful (don't scan correctly).
Anyone else experiencing the same problems? Any solutions out there?
Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS
------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Koha-devel mailing list Koha-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/koha-devel
------------------- End of the original message ---------------------
--------------------------------------------- Protect your mails from viruses thanks to Alinto Premium services http://www.alinto.com
Thomas D a écrit :
There are at the very least potential Koha users who want to use barcode generation. I have not experimented with actually using the barcode generation in Koha, myself.
PREVIOUS DISCUSSION
There was a conversation between owen and tim on #koha on 5 August 2005 about trying to use the barcode generator. tim seemed to have misidentified the script being called to actually generate the barcodes in referring to them as code 39, or 3 of 9. I followed his example later that night without looking at the code calling the correct script. There is in fact an old script in /intranet/scripts/misc/barcodes.pl for generating much simpler code 39 barcodes.
CODE INTERPRETATION
The script integrated into the Koha intranet is supposed to generate code 128 barcodes. Vault Information Services. Code 128 symbology. barcodeisland.com . http://www.barcodeisland.com/code128.phtml A useful page for understanding code 128.
the question being : why do we need to limit the generation to code128 ? imho, we should add a listbox to let the user choose one of the most common possibilities. -- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)
I completely agree--except for proprietary formats, if there are different barcode schemes which are useful (or actually used, might be a better standard) which can be included, then they should be made available. We use 39/3-of-9 rather than code128 and although I can't speak to whether we'd ever have need for the ability to generate them in the future (we purchase them now), we have had that need in the past (in another system). Spencer On 9/13/05, Paul POULAIN <paul.poulain@free.fr> wrote:
the question being : why do we need to limit the generation to code128 ? imho, we should add a listbox to let the user choose one of the most common possibilities.
-- Paul POULAIN Consultant indépendant en logiciels libres responsable francophone de koha (SIGB libre http://www.koha-fr.org)
Joshua Ferraro <jmf@liblime.com> wrote:
1. The file that's exported has an extension of .pl ... this means that most OSes can't determine that it's a PDF by default. What's the best way to export it as a useful filename and extension?
The CGI needs to generate a header like: Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="test.pdf" Most browsers and download tools will then Do The Right Thing. Hope that helps, -- MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
In my experience (http://www.kohadocs.org/usersguide/ch01s04.html#d0e1240), the barcode generator only really works with 11-digit barcodes. Otherwise you get leading and trailing garbage. Stephen Joshua Ferraro said:
Hi all,
Is anyone using barcode printing on a production system? I recently tried to get them working and although I can get it to produce barcodes there are two problems:
1. The file that's exported has an extension of .pl ... this means that most OSes can't determine that it's a PDF by default. What's the best way to export it as a useful filename and extension?
2. The barcodes that are generated have leading zeros and one zero after the barcode. So they're almost right, but in their current form aren't really useful (don't scan correctly).
Anyone else experiencing the same problems? Any solutions out there?
Cheers, -- Joshua Ferraro VENDOR SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE President, Technology migration, training, maintenance, support LibLime Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS jmf@liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS
-- Stephen Hedges Skemotah Solutions, USA www.skemotah.com -- shedges@skemotah.com
participants (6)
-
Joshua Ferraro -
MJ Ray -
Paul POULAIN -
Spencer Anspach -
Stephen Hedges -
Thomas D