[Koha-devel] EAN-13 barcode support

[Dobrica Pavlinusic]

I need to develop EAN-13 barcode support in next two weeks to migrate
one university library from custom software.

First step should be creation of RFC document, but I didn't receive
confirmation e-mail from wiki, so I can't add it there directly. I tried
with this and gmail.com e-mail address, so I would be greatful if
somebody could help me with that.

Basically, library now uses EAN-13[1] barcode which is zero-padded primary key
in old system istead of ISBN or ISSN. Since books allready have barcodes
on them, we can't change it.

To make things more insteresting, at least one barcode reader reports it
as UPC-A[2] without first leading zero, since EAN-13 has backwards
compatibility with it.

So, my first question is should I store barcodes padded with zeros in
Koha? It seems that itemBarcodeInputFilter syspref and small change to
barcodedecode in C4/Circulation.pm will support both solutions, and it
seems to be that 13-digit EAN-13 with padded zeros is cleaner solution.

Next, I would need to implement plugin which generates new barcodes in
same format (with check digit). This would involve change to autoBarcode
syspref in cataloguing/value_builder/barcode.pl and new C4/Barcode/EAN13.pm
to support next barcode while ignoring last checksum digit.

Finally, we need to print them. PDF::Reuse::Barcode allready supports
EAN13, so it seems that small change to C4/Labels/Label.pm would be sufficiant.

Am I missing something important other than tests? :-)


1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EAN-13
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPC-A

-- 
Dobrica Pavlinusic               2share!2flame            dpavlin at rot13.org
Unix addict. Internet consultant.             http://www.rot13.org/~dpavlin