> I have tried posting below message in the relevant thread, but
> apparently Google Groups is having trouble with postings at the moment
> (there was an alert from a Google Groups Guide when I was first
> writing it). I am resending it in its own thread, I hope this isn't
> too spammy :)
> Hi Jeff and everyone,
> What a coincidence! I have hacked together the same function you are
> envisioning here, by using first temp files, then IO objects and then
> StringIO. StringIO is great, don't get me wrong, but I still ran into
> a lot of trouble, performance was abysmal and it required ImageMagick,
> rmagick and Ghostscript to be installed on the server for conversion.
> Now I've written an extension for Ruby FPDF that can print Gbarcode
> barcodes directly. This only requires the Gbarcode gem instead, works
> 100% in-memory and seems to be extremely fast and efficient. The code
> is here:
> http://code.zhdk.ch/projects/leihs/browser/trunk/lib/fpdf/fpdf_gbarco...
> I blogged about it here (shameless plug):
> http://rca.vmk.zhdk.ch/blog/articles/2008/01/25/gbarcode-support-for-...
> And I've let Brian Ollenberger know. Since he is also including the
> FPDF_EPS extension and others with Ruby FPDF, perhaps he would like to
> include FPDF_Gbarcode.
> What so you think? Might this do what you need? We can add a function
> to scale the width (can be done via various ways, e.g. by adjusting
> the bar width factor) and add other bells and whistles, such as a
> function to detect whether the barcode would print off the page. Right
> now it's a bit rudimentary.
> Coincidence number two, by the way: I found this posting by googling
> for other people who wanted to use Ruby FPDF with barcodes, but I
> never thought I'd come across this group. I did a little background
> work for Alex Antener's projects at the Malawi Polytechnic in
> 2004/2006 and for some reason the name Soyapi Mumba means something to
> me. And just this past Thursday I was showing people the videos of
> William Kamkwamba's windmill at a Ubuntu user meeting here in Zürich.
> Sometimes it's a strange (and small) world.
