Creating Bar Codes with PHP?

haxr01

I'm trying come up with a way to develop barcodes on the fly with PHP. What I'd like to be able to do is create a shipping label with a barcode at the bottom. I can generate and print barcodes from the command line with the barcode frontend. Is there anyway I can intergrate this with PHP? I would like to be able to pass PHP a variable from a form that could be parsed thus producing a barcode that can be printed.
Any suggestions/fixed would be greatly appreciated. Also, what's the best way to make a PHP page printer friendly?
Thanks all!!

The-Master

You can use the image functions in php if you wanted to create an image of a barcode. I don't really understand how you would do it though... Do you want a totally random barcode each time? It would be relatively easy with the imageline function.

Please give us more idea about how you want them to be generated.

NogDog

PEAR has an Image_Barcode package.

The-Master

I don't know if this will be useful to you. I haven't looked at it. There may be other classes but I just stumbled upon it when looking for something and thought of you!!!

haxr01

Master...it actually wouldn't produce a random number, but a number that either a user/form enters or that is fed from the database. Remember, that the barcode is just a visual representation of an alpha or numeric string....so depending upon the type it produces bars that can be read by a scanner that are then translated back to the original string.
Nog-Dog, i will take a look at image_barcode...i just have to try and locate rpms for each of the given packages.
Thanks a bunch guys!

Weedpacket

haxr01 wrote:
...the barcode is just a visual representation of an alpha or numeric string.

So you'll probably find a font out there that represents the encoding you're using. Then you could use imagettftext to write the string directly onto an image.