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."

Comments

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.

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: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)