FPDF_Gbarcode extension for Gbarcode support in Ruby FPDF

[Ramon Cahenzli]

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_gbarcode.rb

I blogged about it here (shameless plug):

http://rca.vmk.zhdk.ch/blog/articles/2008/01/25/gbarcode-support-for-ruby-fpdf/

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.

[Lee Irving(MagpieUK)]

Hi there and welcome.

Many thanks for this.

I will take a look at your work and see what use I can put it too, I
am sure the others in the group will as well.

On Jan 28, 8:16 am, Ramon Cahenzli <ramon.cahen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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-...