Replacing Jetform - Open Source Barcode Printing Alternatives?

diabolus_in_america asks: "I work for a mid-size manufacturer. Currently we use Jetform running on HP/UX to print the majority of our barcode labels to Zebra thermal printers. However, Jetform is a dead technology, and we are would like to look at open source alternatives. Is there an open source alternative to Jetform? What we need is a system that lets us mark up and design a barcode label which can then be populated from data files at print time. In its day, the Jetform system was an excellent and quick solution to barcode printing. But those days are over, at least for us, and we'd like to move to an open source alternative, if one exists."

Why is it dead ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to think about a Free Software solution, because if you can get to source code without paying licensing fees it increases your businesses reliability and flexibility.

However, are you sure you have to switch now ? What exactly is it that you can't do that you want to do ? Just because you haven't seen a gushy cutting edge article about jetforms in the trade press lately, is no reason to drop it. Does every portion of your business have to be a current fad ?

Barcode printing

[jjshoe]

lets see 1 [freshmeat.net] 2 [google.com] and not to mention sf. Also try replacing barcode with upc.

Teaching people to use google since 1998

Re:Barcode printing - YAY!!! New acronym...

[greenhide]

called RTFR:

Read The Friggin' Results [google.com].

I was going to suggest that he do a google search, then I saw that it returns a bunch of crap. I'm guessing that this guy tried google, and didn't find anything useful. That's why he's actually asking a bunch of thinking humans what ideas they might have.

Re:Barcode printing - YAY!!! New acronym...

[tooth]

I've been doing barcode stuff with Jetform for a while to all sorts of different printers, and I've still have yet to find anything that aproaches what jetform can do, even though design is a sucky program and annoys the heck out of me.

Jetform is great because it has such a huge libary of printers to choose from... Upgraded your printers? No worries, just recompile your forms and presto, they're working again, no need to muck around with printer control codes, no need to recompile programs (good!!) or ch

bar codes

[jalet]

try ReportLab from http://www.reportlab.com

It's a Python library to generate PDF files.

I think I've seen some support for barcodes there.

Another one

[reynaert]

GNU Barcode. Works from the command line, supports several standards, and generates PostScript and PCL. Also has a library that can be embedded in your own applications. We've used it on a smallish scale and had no problems with it.

Re:bar codes

[pi_rules]

While the parent poster has a nice idea, it's way off base. The original seeker of answers knows this, I'm sure, but I thought I'd point it out.

The printers in question are not normal printers. They do not understand that much and you really do not need to be trying to convert a PDF into a format that they can understand. The printers actually -know- how to print a barcode. You setup a field for it and give the printer some numbers and it'll put it where you want it in the format you want it.

Reportlab

Re:bar codes

[llefler]

While you can print images on some barcode printers, most deal with plain text. Here is code that prints the same barcode using three different programming languages.

Intermec IPL
B17;o500,100;f3;c6,0,0;h200;w4;i1;d3,12345
( prefixed/suffixed with STX/ETX codes, which Slashdot happily strips)

Zebra ZPL
^FO100,725^BCN,200,N,N,N,N^FV12345^FS

Eltron EPL
B700,500,2,1,4,12,200,N,"12345"

If you are really interested in learning the languages, you can download them in PDF format from the manufacturers. (Eltron is now owned by Zebra)

We're currently using software from Loftware to handle most of our barcode printing. It has a decent (but not great) GUI designer. And it's not cheap or OS. My biggest problem with it is that it stores the printer type in the label. It's entirely too rigid. For example; we purchased Intermec 3400D printers to create PDF417s. But all of the rest of our printers are 3400Bs. While the D model can do everything a B model can do, Loftware doesn't allow you to print a B label on a D printer. OTOH, it has a nice feature where you can use a label design as a template, then drop a text data file in a directory and it will print the label. It's a simple way to interface with other applications.

BTW, an earlier poster implied that UPC was synonymous with barcode. That's like telling someone who asks for a PC to go see Dell. It may be one of the more commonly known formats, but there is much more to them than UPCs. (Or EAN barcodes for the non-american viewers)

Same here.

[GigsVT]

We looked for something like this a while back.

What we wanted to do is use color thermal or rollfed inkjet to print a picture of the product on the carton label with the barcode.

Every rollfed color printer we looked at had fatal flaws. Most used a proprietary language for programming. "But we have Windows print driver!!" Big fucking deal, didn't help us, there's no windows software that can do what we needed anyway. Why are open standards to damn hard to understand? We'd have probably bought your hardware if you hadn't decided to be assholes.

Only one supported a standard language, PCL/XL, and that was the color rollfed inkjet. Which unfortunately used proprietary HP ink cartridges that cost $199 a piece. That's for each color, so $800 to change all ink cartridges. They were only like 350ml IIRC.

Anyway, our plan was to use enscript, along with imagemagick, and some other piece to create the barcode (like pbmupc maybe), and then compose them all into an image with shell scripts, and print them the normal way.

Unfortunately, we gave up on the project when we realized that no one makes suitable hardware.

Re:Same here.

[Elwood P Dowd]

When you say "we gave up on the project" do you mean you don't print those barcodes, or you went with a Windows-based solution?

Re:Same here.

[GigsVT]

A little of both. We already had a windows based system printing black and white barcodes and text information, we kept that. We ditched the project of printing color labels with pictures of the product on it, and buying color label printers. Some company out there lost up to $30,000+ in sales, plus ongoing consumables, because they didn't like open standards, and all wanted to play the lock-in game.

What they do instead, and had been doing, is taking an actual label from inside the box and cutting it, a

Re:Same here.

[curunir]

Rather than use enscript an imagemagick which would make the solution very platform dependant, why not use XSL-T to create an SVG representation of the barcode?

I've never had a chance to play with it myself, but I found this article [renderx.com] that discusses the process.

Re:Same here.

[GigsVT]

Enscript and Imagemagick run on every platform that matters. Besides, you are talking about data formats. Enscript is going to make postscript, pretty platform independant.

Re:Same here.

[Chelloveck]

If the color portion of your label is always the same (ie., each product picture is the same) you could try getting labels pre-printed with the static portions and the printing the dynamic portions with a black-and-white printer. This won't work well if you need to change the color picture more than once a roll of labels, though.

Re:Same here.

[GigsVT]

That's the thing, the image is about as dynamic as it can get. It needs to be generated in real time from EPS (DCS2 actually) files that reside on a central Linux file server.

I don't want to put low res versions of the images into a database either, I just want them dynamically generated on the spot. We dynamically generate JPGs from them for the web site, so it's not too slow to do on the fly.

You can see why any Windows solution is highly crippled in this area. I'd basically have to write something fr

Re:Same here.

[Chelloveck]

What sort of volume (labels/minute) do you need? In what sort of environment will these be printed and applied (office, assembly line, etc.)? How permanent does the image have to be? How small and finicky is the barcode? How much of an issue is the cost of the label itself and the printer consumables? Do you need automated print-and-apply?

The first solution that pops to mind is to get a standard color laser printer and a box of Avery labels, but that's only good for low-volume runs. There are some

Re:Same here.

[GigsVT]

What sort of volume (labels/minute) do you need? In what sort of environment will these be printed and applied (office, assembly line, etc.)? How permanent does the image have to be? How small and finicky is the barcode? How much of an issue is the cost of the label itself and the printer consumables? Do you need automated print-and-apply?

The volume isn't particularly high, maybe a thousand per day per printer. They would be applied in an assembly line kind of environment. The image would need to stand

Re:Same here.

[i_am_nitrogen]

I'm pretty sure there's a color laser out there that will print on banner paper (the zigzag stuff with perforations between pages and holes on the sides to pull the paper through). I know there are B/W lasers that do it. If you could make your labels in a similar format, I bet you could just use a wooden dowel with a simple stand in place of a stack of paper, and feed it into the printer.

Re:Same here.

[GigsVT]

I didn't find any.

The main problem I think is that color lasers are generally multipass systems. The paper goes around and around in a circle, 4 times, once for each primary toner.

I think I remember seeing some extremely expensive singlepass color laser systems, but basically you are paying for 4 complete printers. IIRC they were way out of our price range.

Bar-code printers

[Whatchamacallit]

FYI,

I used to work a great deal in the bar-code field. I remember connecting Intermec printers to AS400 systems. This involved using Windows software to design a label graphically, then export to some data files that were kinda like XML but a proprietary format. Two files, one with the printer instructions and the other with data. The data file would be pasted into AS400 programming code and every time a label was to be printed, the label layout and the data stream would be sent to the printer. I believe the language was JCL.

I am sure Zebra has ways to do what you are looking to accomplish. I doubt seriously, there are many Open Source packages that can do all that you need to do. You need to find a vendor who does value add and works with multiple manufacturers.

It make take some work to find such a vendor, most are simply selling equipment and not providing any value add whatsoever.

Call the Zebra printer manufacturer and they should be able to locate a vendor that can work with you. A simple looksee at their website details the following:

BAR-ONE 5.1 with Accelio Present Central (formerly JetForm Central)

Easy, Cost-Effective Bar Code Printing from ERP Applications

The combined power of BAR-ONE bar code printing software and the Accelio Present Central (formerly Accelio Present Central (formerly JetForm Central)) output-management solutions make integration of bar codes into ERP systems a snap, no matter what the platform. Traditionally, transforming ERP data from existing reports and other ASCII formats into high-quality bar code labels has been an expensive and time-consuming custom programming task. But now it's as simple as a point and a click, thanks to a groundbreaking software pairing developed jointly by Zebra Technologies and JetForm Corporation.

Looks like JetForm is not dead but in partnership with Zebra and the new system is called Accelio Present Central.

http://www.zebra.com/SD/barone_jetform.htm

Not too hard -- roll your own custom stuff.

[pi_rules]

The barcode printers you're talking about are probably mind numbingly simple devices. I used to work with some of the Zebra and Monarch printers "back in the day". Somewhere around 1997 to 1998ish.

The software was rather cumbersome to even get simple tasks done. Opening the printing software, selecting the proper tag to print an 'On Sale for $X.XX' sticker and running through the menus to find the proper Print screen and typing in the price was too much time and energy for somebody who just wanted 300 tags quick.

So, I started dumping the printer's output to a file instead of the serial port. A little head scratching later and I knew where all the variables were.

Monarch was even better IIRC -- they actually published instruction codes for their stuff. Dumping to a file was sometimes easier than properly reading documentation too.

The actual tag layout instructions are probably mindnumbingly simple. The area that's really lacking (or at least it was in '97ish) was getting things hooked up to a proper database that wasn't inflexible as all get out. You could rig an ODBC driver up to an Access DB but it was crufty, and the tag designer software was a bear. It was always much easier to hack my own little job together.

Yes, they still use some of it to this day.

Personally an on-the-fly label designer never made a whole lot of sense to me for these products. It was nice if you wanted to dump a template out but using it to actually hook up to your data was never a good idea. On top of that you sometimes get people trying to design the labels that don't realize why they can't fit 2k of data into a 2x2 square. Maybe that was my just my boss though.

"Why can't you fit more than 30 characters in that box?"

"Physics."

"Oh, 'cmon, it has to be possible."

"Ok, here's a pen. Try and fit more than 30 letters in this space."

Thankfully it was my mother, I could get away with that.

Do your own...

[innosent]

We use the Zebra printers where I work, and from my experience, you can do any label you need by sending the ZPL commands. All of the typesetting, graphics, and text can be coded into the fields, as well as the fonts and logic for printing barcodes. You can print to them in raster mode, too, but why do you need to?

Depending on your needs, it should only take a matter of an hour or two to code up something to generate ZPL from the user's requests, or you may be able to lex/yacc it from another format. Read the programmers manual that came with the printers (or at least should have). There are plenty of examples in there for barcodes, text, images, reverse printing, vertical printing, etc. I've done this for inventory coding (probably simpler than your needs), and it only took about 20 minutes of trial-and-error to get my ZPL script right. (And for reference, the format is a lot like a simplified PCL, so if you've had experience with PCL, it should be cake.)

Re:Do your own...

[innosent]

As a follow up, once you have the scripts right, just write your code to print the labels, inserting data from your database where needed. If you don't use that many different formats, then you could just code everything straight into the program, kinda like embedding data in HTML in CGI scripts, except with output to the serial port.

Also, doing it this way will allow you to use the daisy-chain feature of the printers, since directing output to any printer on the chain is just another ZPL command. The ZP

FYI: JetForm/Accelio was acquired by Adobe

[gavin.frank.mckenzie]

What was Indigo Software, waaayyy back in the late 80s, became JetForm. After many happy years as JetForm, the company re-launched itself as Accelio. A few months later, Accelio was acquired by Adobe.

A brief tour of the Adobe website, such as the Enterprise products [adobe.com] reveals products like Adobe Central Pro Output Server [adobe.com] which traces its heritage back to the same JetForm Central product (or JetForm Server for old-timers) that likely produced the story-submitter's barcodes.

So while the name JetForm may n

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

perl's GD::Barcode

[Danny Rathjens]

GD::Barcode [cpan.org]

I've used it for a neat project where the only input device for a kiosk was a barcode scanner. (We made this funky menu system for administration(loading content and downloading logs) which involved bouncing the focus between choices and you would swipe the 'admin' barcode when you wanted to choose an option.)

Krysalis Java/JSP barcode library

[krisbrowne42]

This is an Open Source solution I found a while back. Libraries to produce SVG barcodes in a variety of encoding standards. With a little tweaking it should be able to be made data-driven quickly. http://www.krysalis.org/barcode

Kbarcode

[neves]

Try this great kde 3.0 application: KBarcode [kbarcode.net]. It can work with three different barcode engines [kbarcode.net]:

• TBarcode [tec-it.com]
• PDF417 barcode [freshmeat.net]
• GNU Barcode [gnu.org]

Maybe you want to use the barcode engines directly.

Re:Kbarcode

[neves]

I forgot to say: it generates a PDF file with the desired labels.

JPGraph

[xoboots]

Not yet mentioned is the very good PHP based JPGraph library. The professional version (which has a fee of 85 euro) includes an aditional module which does graphing which is demo'd here [aditus.nu].

Alternatives

[E_elven]

I suggest using a waterproof marker. There are a lot of different distributions out there (some call them 'flavours' but they do kind of taste the same, all) and they can be acquired in a variety of locations. Some have peripherals like remote storage for ink, whereas some incorporate all functionality in the felt kernel. Anyway, it's cheap, the interface is intuitive (although you can customize it pretty wildly, for example switching hands is remarkably simple and requires no reconfiguration). Plus, it'd create a lot of new jobs. Who knows, maybe you'd get a tax cut for it.

Re:Alternatives

[llefler]

Oddly enough, the users have never found this suggestion all that amusing. I'm not sure why.

Although one ingenious user did actually create barcodes with MS Paint. Nothing could scan them, but they sure looked good.

Write it yourself!

[zero-one]

I have set up bar code stuff before and found the best way of getting what I want is to write it myself. I was using a printer similar to this Intermec one [intermec.com]. Intermec provided nice documentation [intermec.com] on everything needed to program it. The resulting data sent to the printer looked something like this [google.com]. So see if your printer has a nice simple programming language and then sit down for an afternoon with some fresh coffee and work out a template for it.

did you check the zebra website ?

[sxpert]

Hey,
you should have checked the zebra website, which has the whole enchilada of manuals available at http://www.zebra.com/SS/manuals.htm [zebra.com].
They have a pain-in-the-ass registration thing, but check those links, you can wget the pdfs without even accepting the stupid click through agreement...

Fonts

[ecloud]

I understand that label printers probably have built-in bar code generators.

However for other printers, the obvious device-independent method would be to use a barcode font. Years ago I had a TTF font like that for Windows, and some Word macros to put Codabar codes on envelopes. (This was the early 90's, and I didn't discover Linux until '94, sorry.)

Today I found this:

http://user.it.uu.se/~jan/barfonts/

Looks like just the thing for generating Postscript docs with barcodes in them.

Here's "I Shot the S