Libre Barcode Project

https://graphicore.github.io/librebarcode/

by luu • 27 days ago

288 62 27 days ago

graphicore.github.io

1bpp• 27 days ago

Is anyone willing to sacrifice their sanity for the sake of implementing a QR renderer as TTF hinting code?

I love seeing nonsense like that. How that work graphically though? Just keep adding to a same QR code that keeps getting denser as more text is added? I guess it doesn't have to practical though :)

gus_massa• 26 days ago

Someone implemented the Bad Apple animation inside a font https://blog.erk.dev/posts/anifont/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373170550 | 177 points | Aug 2023 | 62 comments )

ValdikSS2• 26 days ago

    - https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/
    - https://github.com/bjia56/translate.ttf
    - https://github.com/hsfzxjy/handwriter.ttf

Harfbuzz now has WASM interpreter for a shaper. You can make pretty much arbitrary programs in fonts now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms1Drb9Vw9M

foodevl• 25 days ago

Yes. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48703200

dmitrygr• 27 days ago

This is a perversion of the most sickening nature. Nicely done!

breakingcups• 27 days ago

I'm surprised at this reaction, this has been standard practice for many years in various companies where I worked.

dfox2• 27 days ago

The fact that this is standard practice does not mean that it is not perverse. It kind of works sanely for plain Code39 (and even then you will see effects of doing that in weird places, like VAG stamping human readable VIN on a chassis, including the Code39 start/stop symbols), once you start using barcode fonts for Code128-derived symbologies (ie. UPC/EAN) the whole thing becomes a pointless exercise.

Dwedit• 26 days ago

I mean there was already the Bad Apple font (keep adding another character to your text and you get the next video frame)

utopiah2• 27 days ago

Damn, yes please.

Another cool font, but less original, I stumbled upon recently is Marelle https://marelle.forge.apps.education.fr/ for cursive.

endre• 27 days ago

this is genius

albert_e3• 27 days ago

https://marelle.forge.apps.education.fr/

This website is in French so I was unable tounderstand the text

and the website is very resistant to automatic translation by Google Translate

https://marelle-forge-apps-education-fr.translate.goog/?_x_t...

What gives?

utopiah2• 27 days ago

No problem translating it with Firefox :

" Marelle is a free cursive police force for teaching writing in elementary school. Introduction

This project is supported by the Digital Directorate for Education of the Ministry of National Education, and developed in the Forge of Digital Educational Commons.

The Marelle police is designed specifically for teaching cursive writing in elementary school, it was developed by a team of teachers and designers specialized in writing systems.

Teaching Cursive Writing

Structure and sequence of letters, rhythm and proportion, contextual variants: the Marelle font was thought around specific criteria to offer a quality model to teachers and students. Particular attention has been paid to the trace of numbers, capital letters and punctuation. A complete professional tool

The Marelle police offers 3 types of variants:

    uppercase sticks or cursive
    with or without lineage Seyes
    height of ascendants and descendants

These variants can be combined to best meet the needs of teachers and students." etc

piltboy• 27 days ago

"Marelle is a free cursive font designed for teaching handwriting in [French] elementary school."

I'm not sure they owe it to anyone to make the website available in English :-)

tokai• 27 days ago

ooh thanks, the Bâton in capital letter is very nice.

tecleandor• 27 days ago

Nice! That looks pretty similar to the one in "Cuadernos Rubio", a system that was super popular from the 60s to the 90s in Spain (that still exists) for learning handwriting in primary school.

mos_basik• 26 days ago

Love it. Flashbacks to CE1 and CE2 (2nd and 3rd grade in the US system) in a French embassy school, simultaneously handling "immersion in real french", "using a fountain pen for the first time", "different long division" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_division#Eurasia) and "different cursive" (I think the method I was coming from was D'Nealian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian)

nemoniac• 27 days ago

ASCII only?

Terr_• 27 days ago

More or less, AFAICT the underlying barcode standards don't support Unicode, if that's what you mean.

It looks like Code 128 could potentially handle some ISO-8859-1 accented latin characters, but I'm not sure how to test it.

ale42• 27 days ago

Code 128 supports some ISO-8859-1 indeed, but it requires switching between encodings (there are 3 of them), and couldn't work with 128B (I guess the one used by the font, as it supports ASCII). See the table on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_128

matsemann• 27 days ago

Even with plain ASCII we sometime struggle with the various scanners, as they emulate keyboards. So for instance using : in the barcode as a separator of values becomes wonky if the OS has a different input language than expected.

alex_suzuki6• 27 days ago

This would be more interesting if you wouldn’t need to calculate checksums yourself, and could just write the barcode value. Good luck doing that with something like Reed-Solomon (QR, Data Matrix, etc.) or the shenanigans they’re doing with GS1 DataBar.

ahlCVA2• 27 days ago

Barcode fonts have been around for ages. But what's cute about this one is that it can calculate the EAN13 checksum on its own.

alex_suzuki6• 27 days ago

It can’t, at least for Code 128? There’s a text field that you enter the text into, and then the start/stop/checksum characters are computed.

ahlCVA2• 27 days ago

It seems like it doesn't do this for Code 128 (possibly because it is variable-width?). It definitely works with EAN13 though - I tried it locally using only the TTF file.

dfox2• 27 days ago

Do not do this unless you do not have any other choice. Preferrably use whatever native barcode support of the printer involved, if it does not have that, just generate the barcode as vector image or bitmap with a resolution that is a integer fraction of the printers resolution. Generating correct Code128 as a SVG is about the same amount of work as generating the correct input for some sort of barcode font (the hard part is determining the switches between character sets, not generating bars from bytes).

alex_suzuki6• 27 days ago

Shameless plug for my web-based Zint frontend: https://barcode.new (in-browser WASM)

I wrote it specifically because most online barcode generators don’t support vector output or suck in some other way: ads, signup necessary, code payload exposed to server-side processing etc.

pwdisswordfishs2• 26 days ago

Aside from obfuscating the source code to sell licenses, how does this benefit from WASM?

Barcodes have been generated for decades on low-resource embedded devices. Even what would have been a modest-to-low-end machine 25 years ago would have no problem handling the compute needed for this job.

On this end, it just looks like the user has to deal with the penalty of dealing with 1 MB of resources when hitting the main page.

tfpgh• 26 days ago

This is amazing!

mark-r3• 26 days ago

I once worked at a company that used a Code39 font cartridge in HP Laserjets. When HP stopped putting font cartridge slots in their printers, I had the task of intercepting print jobs and detecting the font selection sequence, then taking the text and converting it to a Code128 bitmap graphic. It wasn't hard at all, kind of fun actually.

darksim9053• 26 days ago

'font' cartridge? the what now?

Theodores2• 26 days ago

You have given me the encouragement I needed...

Recently I put some 8-bit graphics in SVG using lines and stroke dash arrays. I also got them animated, in a space efficient way, by keeping the lines that do not change from frame to frame. (I now have Maria and Willy from 'Jet Set Willy' for the wait after a form is submitted, plus a few Space Invaders. I am resisting the urge to do Pac-Man ghosts, but I will invent a need for them...)

Since an SVG can be a mystery box full of CSS, SMIL, Javascript and 'foreign object' imports, I am tempted to give it a go, so that a CSS variable is passed to the depths of the shadow DOM in a URL fragment or query string, to magically return either a barcode or a QR code.

This will take a little while, but I am keen to give it a go. In some ways, SVG is like 'Duplo LEGO' with the Libre Barcode as a font more like 'LEGO Technik', requiring vastly more skill.

Just because you can doesn't mean that you should, plus there are many barcode libraries that I know well, so why reinvent the wheel?

The typical barcode library usually comes with fluff, formats and libraries that I don't need. Hence 'qr.svg#upc-number' with it just being one file has appeal.

I am not yet up to speed on the latest AI toys, however, given the problem space is well defined, could I just ask AI chat bot to churn out the code for this in a matter of seconds, for it to encapsulate the logic in an SVG? Would it know how to specify 'crisp edges' and what the deal is with aspect ratio?

Similarly, could I also ask the AI nicely to create my own barcode font?

These seem manageable problems for todays trillion-dollar wonder tech, it is not as if I am asking for a cure for cancer or anything hard, yet I lack confidence in an AI solution, and feel I might as well work it out myself, given my goal is learning SVG rather than prompting.

My lack of confidence is the AI solution is due to the scarcity of people writing online about doing cool things with CSS variables, URL fragments and code in SVG. A Google search does not show 'stroke dash array' things for QR codes and online QR code generators create lots of fully fledged rect-angles, that lack the space efficiency or human-readability of my prefered approach, even if gzip doesn't care.

Sorry for bringing AI into everything, I just have my doubts that the new toys are that capable when it comes to novel solutions.

jpitz• 26 days ago

I did exactly that ( bitmap ) for a retail application back in ~2000. It was just a couple of constants for the stop and start sigils plus an array of bits for the digits....it was a quick work.

OrangeMusic• 26 days ago

I'm sorry, after reading your comment several times I still don't understand why we shouldn't use this. What is the problem with it?

ciupicri• 26 days ago

It's not clear to me how can I put FNC3 and the beginning of the Code 128 bar code.

joewhale• 26 days ago

fyi code 39 barcodes are outdated because of the lack of check sums and leads to false positives.

infogulch• 26 days ago

Neat! Barcodes are much more complex that I knew before looking into it. I used JsBarcode [1] to create a special barcode that reprograms a cheap barcode scanner we got on Amazon to be able to scan both UPS and FedEx tracking numbers. It is published on CodePen [2].

[1] https://github.com/lindell/JsBarcode

[2] https://codepen.io/infogulch/pen/yyLJdrP

muhammadusman• 26 days ago

just curious: are barcodes better in anyway compared to a QR code?

wps• 26 days ago

I believe they are much faster to scan, as you don’t need to identify the corners.

dimatura• 26 days ago

They are simpler and can be read by more devices, especially legacy devices that are still pretty widely deployed. Other than that, not much to say in their favor. They have lower data density compared to 2D codes such as QR or datamatrix. Many linear barcode symbologies have weak or nonexistent error correction capability. But often you don't need that extra data, and the cost of changing processes and equipment to upgrade to a new barcode format is seen as not worth it.

ChrisMarshallNY• 26 days ago

Very nice.

Now, do it with QR codes...

Libre Barcode Project

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