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_suzuki

  today at 10:38 AM

  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.

  • pwdisswordfishs

    today at 12:37 PM

    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.

    • alex_suzuki

      today at 1:35 PM

      The benefit of WASM in this case is that you can wrap a mature library written in C/C++ (in this case, Zint), and run it in a runtime that supports WASM, e.g. the browser. There's plenty of people who occasionally need to create barcodes, and not in some industrial, automated way, and a browser is just an easy way to accomplish that. Yes, you have 1MB loaded when you load the page, but hopefully that will be served from a cache.

      • nolroz

        today at 4:57 PM

        One MEGAbyte?? How could you!?

• mark-r

  today at 12:35 PM

  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.

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

• iguessthislldo

  today at 7:23 AM

  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

    today at 1:42 PM

    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 )

• Induane

  today at 5:16 AM

  [flagged]

  • 1bpp

    today at 5:27 AM

    [flagged]

  • sdfsdfsd3443f

    today at 9:27 AM

    You all know this is the answer. In fact you will do this and then post it on Show HN proudly.

    • dspillett

      today at 10:28 AM

      The downvotes aren't saying the comment is wrong (though it might be), they are saying “if it is that easy, you ask Claude”. The parent comment seemed to be specifically asking if a person would work on it, not specifying what tools might be used in that work.

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_suzuki

  today at 10:34 AM

  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.

  • ahlCVA

    today at 10:53 AM

    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.

    • alex_suzuki

      today at 11:16 AM

      Oh, interesting! I tried it in Word on macOS but didn't get it to work. But it works in the browser (question mark = calculates check digit).

      It uses this, which i have no idea what it is :-) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/f...

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

fyi code 39 barcodes are outdated because of the lack of check sums and leads to false positives.

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

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

• wps

  today at 5:52 PM

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

Damn, yes please.

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

• mos_basik

  today at 3:22 PM

  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)

• albert_e

  today at 7:43 AM

  > 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?

  • utopiah

    today at 8:36 AM

    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

    • albert_e

      today at 6:32 PM

      Thanks!

      (the first line made me laugh)

      I now understand why there is no English version (though still surprised Google could not translate it)

    • jurgemaister

      today at 8:57 AM

      > cursive police force

      • bombcar

        today at 12:03 PM

        I know I've often cursive'd the police.

      • ligne

        today at 11:31 AM

        Homographs are tricky :-)

  • piltboy

    today at 8:36 AM

    "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 :-)

    • albert_e

      today at 6:35 PM

      That there is not much use for an english version -- is only evident to me with hindsight after reading the english translation :)

      Thanks

  • tokai

    today at 12:21 PM

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

• tecleandor

  today at 10:06 AM

  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.

• endre

  today at 6:45 AM

  this is genius

Very nice.

Now, do it with QR codes...

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.

ASCII only?

• Terr_

  today at 8:19 AM

  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

    today at 8:37 AM

    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

    • trashb

      today at 10:12 AM

      actually it seems they support 128A 128B and 128C with the correct encoder.

        To use these fonts you have to use an encoder like the one below. It is an optimizing encoder, that means, it produces the shortest barcode that can encode the input. For this the encoder, if necessary or shorter, switches between the three available Code Sets (list from Wikipedia):
      

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

  • matsemann

    today at 10:37 AM

    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.

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

• breakingcups

  today at 7:43 AM

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

  • dfox

    today at 10:20 AM

    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

  today at 12:50 PM

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

[flagged]