Libre Barcode Project • Hacker News Board

Re: Libre Barcode Project

#41

Post by joewhale » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

fyi code 39 barcodes are outdated because of the lack of check sums and leads to false positives.

Re: Libre Barcode Project

#42

Post by infogulch » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

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

Re: Libre Barcode Project

#43

Post by mos_basik » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 3:22 PM UTC

utopiah wrote: post #6

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

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)

Re: Libre Barcode Project

#44

Post by muhammadusman » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 4:23 PM UTC

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

Re: Libre Barcode Project

#45

Post by nolroz » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

alex_suzuki wrote: post #38

pwdisswordfishs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mai…

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 f…

One MEGAbyte?? How could you!?

Re: Libre Barcode Project

#46

Post by wps » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

muhammadusman wrote: post #44

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

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

Re: Libre Barcode Project

#47

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

Very nice.

Now, do it with QR codes...

Re: Libre Barcode Project

#48

Post by albert_e » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

utopiah wrote: post #14

albert_e wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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…

Thanks!

(the first line made me laugh)

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

Re: Libre Barcode Project

#49

Post by albert_e » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

piltboy wrote: post #15

albert_e wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

"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 :-)

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

Thanks

Re: Libre Barcode Project

#50

Post by darksim905 » Fri, Jun 26, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #35

dfox wrote: post #24

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…

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.

'font' cartridge? the what now?