[FM Discuss] [IAEP] bar code

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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[sent again, to all recipients this time]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 06:13:17PM -0500, David Farning wrote:
>Yes,
>I believe you are right.  Being American, EAN passed over my head
>without notice.  https://commerce.bowker.com/BarCode/faqs.asp
>
>Some places are offering to sell bar codes at around $5US apiece:( It
>does look like some we can easily generate our selves at no cost.

EAN13 is a common barcode format, but there are more than one.

I was recently involved in packaging of organic sheep meat. EAN 13 was 
used, and we could produce it ourselves - the important part is to 
register somewhere centrally to get a unique ID for your "company", then 
you can choose yourself how you organize the rest of the digits in the 
serial number contained in the barcode.

Instead of generating it with a shell script, I would recommend to use 
Inkscape, it has a nice plugin to handle several different barcode 
formats, including EAN13.  Just make sure to read the documentation for 
the barcode format used, and double-check that the result size fits the 
definitions (i.e. it is not stretch or scaled wrongly).


   - Jonas

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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