I am trying to create a GS1-128 barcode using ZPL. The barcode should have parenthesis automatically filled in at the start of the human readable before and after the first two digits.
In other words, I would like to send a SSCC-18 string like this: "00206739780661776353", the human readable should show "(00)206739780661776353" and the barcode should read "00206739780661776353".
This is my code so far:
^XA
^FO360,630^BY2^A0N,30,30^BCN,100,Y,Y,N,D^FD00206739780661776353^FS
^XZ
If I manually input "^FD(00)206739780661776353^FS", the "(00)" shows in the human readable, but not in the barcode, which is what I want, but I am struggling to get the parenthesis around the first two digits automatically. Is there a way to do this in ZPL?
Any help or tips on where to look would be greatly appreciated!
Related
I've been doing some work with ZPL recently for printing manufacturing barcode labels etc.
We have several fields on a custom label format that get replaced with real world data, by searching for a specific string of text in the raw ZPL, and then replacing it with the correct application data. E.g. field1 just gets replaced by whatever we actually need to print there, before the TCP packet is constructed and put onto the network to perform the actual print.
This works just fine (so far), but I'm concerned what if some of our field data ever matches the format of a ZPL command for example, what happens.
Page 48 of the huge ZPL specification document shows what we are doing too, where xxxxxxxxxxx is the data to be replaced.
^XA
^FO50,50^ADN,36,20^FDxxxxxxxxxxx
^FS
^XZ
Is there no formal 'reserved field' format/identifier of sorts, or doing what we're doing the only option?
E.g. search and replace field1 in the ZPL below.
^XA
^FO50,50^ADN,36,20^FDfield1
^FS
^XZ
If what you have to replace in the ZPL code is the content of a field (text or barcode), you can try a different approach and use the ^FN command which is used as a placeholder for variable fields and it is usually used to store and recall templates from the printer memory.
i was expecting this command
^FO15,240^BY3,2:1^BCN,100,Y,N,Y,^FD>:>842011118888^FS
to generate a
(420) 11118888
interpretation line, instead it generates
~n42011118888
anyone have idea how to generate the expected output?
TIA!
Joey
If the firmware is up to date, D mode can be used.
^BCo,h,f,g,e,m
^XA
^FO15,240
^BY3,2:1
^BCN,100,Y,N,Y,D
^FD(420)11118888^FS
^XZ
D = UCC/EAN Mode (x.11.x and newer firmware)
This allows dealing with UCC/EAN with and without chained
application identifiers. The code starts in the appropriate subset
followed by FNC1 to indicate a UCC/EAN 128 bar code. The printer
automatically strips out parentheses and spaces for encoding, but
prints them in the human-readable section. The printer automatically
determines if a check digit is required, calculate it, and print it.
Automatically sizes the human readable.
The ^BC command's "interpretation line" feature does not support auto-insertion of the parentheses. (I think it's safe to assume this is partly because it has no way of determining what your data identifier is by just looking at the data provided - it could be 420, could be 4, could be any other portion of the data starting from the first character.)
My recommendation is that you create a separate text field which handles the logic for the parentheses, and place it just above or below the barcode itself. This is the way I've always approached these in the past - I prefer this method because I have direct control over the font, font size, and formatting of the interpretation line.
I am trying to come to terms with how a barcode is decoded and generated by a scanner.
A note from the client says the following generated bar code consists of extra characters:
Generated Code: |2389299920014}
Extra Characters: Apparently the first two and last three characters are not part of the bar code.
Question
Are the extra characters attached by the bar code reader (therefore dependent on the scanner) or are they an intrinsic part of the barcode?
Here is a sample image of a barcode:
http://imageshack.us/a/img824/1862/dm6x.jpg
Thanks
[SOLVED] My apologies. This was just another one of those cases of 'shooting your mouth off' without doing proper research.
Solution The code is EAN13. The prefix and suffix are probably scanner dependent. The 13 digits in between are as follows (first digit from the left) Check Sum (Next 9 digits) Company Id + Item Id (Last 3 Digits ) GS1 prefix
It's hard to answer without understanding what format you are trying to encode, what the intended contents are, and what the purported contents are.
Some formats add extra information as part of the encoding process, but it does not become part of the content. When correctly encoded and decoded, the output should match the input exactly.
Barcodes encode what they encode and there is no data that is somehow part of the barcode but not somehow encoded in it.
EAN-13 has no scanner-dependent considerations, no. The encoding and decoding of a given number is the same everywhere. EAN-13 encodes 13 digits, so I am not sure what the 13 digits "in between" mean.
You mention GS1, which is something else. A family of barcodes in fact. You'd have to say what specifically you are using. The GS1 encodings are likewise not ambiguous or scanner-dependent. You know what you want to encode, you encode it exactly, it's read exactly.
I have a number in Mathematica, a large number. I have even gotten this number in base 16 form, using OutputForm[]. I am basically trying to write out a number to a file in hex format.
Please keep in mind I am using 123456 in these examples instead of my 70,000 digit number.
Whenever I write a file using a simple Put[123456, "file.raw"] command, I get a raw data file with the actual data 3132333435360A with a line ending.
If I use Put[OutputForm[BaseForm[123456, 16]], "file.raw"] command, I get a raw data file with the data in hex format 31653234300A202020202031360A but still not written as raw data.
I would like the Hex Form of the Number Dumped as Data.
I have tried Export, BinaryWrite, and DumpSave, but can't figure it out.
I just am getting a headache I guess cause I can't see past what I need to do.
One thing I did try was doing:
Export["file.raw", 123456];
But the file is not raw enough. What I mean by that is there is there is header data and extra crap.
Would love to get this working thanks.
Please let us know what you expect to see in your output file, and what you want use it for. Do you want something a human can read, or something in a specified format to be used by a computer? Please provide an example.
The two examples using Put[] correctly provide files containing ASCII characters corresponding to the text representations of your inputs, and which are human-readable.
I think what you're looking for is IntegerString[_,16]:
In[33]:= IntegerString[123456, 16]
Out[33]= "1e240"
str = OpenWrite[];
WriteString[str, IntegerString[123456, 16]];
Close[str];
FilePrint[%]
1e240
(using WriteString instead of Put avoids having the string characters
I need to parse some text from pdfs but the pdf formatting results in extremely unreliable spacing. The result is that I have to ignore the spaces and have a continuous stream of non-space characters.
Any suggestions on how to parse the string and put spaces back into the string by guessing?
I'm using ruby. Or should I say I'musingruby?
Edit: I've pulled the text out using pdf-reader. Some of the pdf files are nicely formatted and some are not. An example of text mixed with positioning:
.7aspe-5.5cts-715.1o0.6f-708.5f-0.4aces-721.4that-716.3are-720.0i-1.8mportant-716.3in-713.9soc-5.5i-1.8alcommunica6.6tion6.3.-711.6Althoug6.3h-708.1m-1.9od6.3els-709.3o6.4f-702.8f5.4ace-707.9proc6.6essing-708.2haveproposed-611.2ways-615.5to-614.7deal-613.2with-613.0these-613.9diff10.4erent-613.7tasks,-611.9it-617.1remainsunclear-448.0how-450.7these-443.2mechanisms-451.7might-446.7be-447.7implemented-447.2in-450.3visualOne-418.9model-418.8of-417.3human-416.4face-421.9processing-417.5proposes-422.7that-419.8informa-tion-584.5is-578.0processed-586.1in-583.1specialised-584.7modules-577.0(Breen-584.4et-582.9al.,-582.32002;Bruce-382.1and-384.0Y92.0oung,-380.21986;-379.2Haxby-379.9et-380.5al.,-
and if I print just string data (I added returns at the end of each line to keep it from
messing up the layout here:
'Distinctrepresentationsforfacialidentityandchangeableaspectsoffacesinthehumantemporal
lobeTimothyJ.Andrews*andMichaelP.EwbankDepartmentofPsychology,WolfsonResearchInstitute,
UniversityofDurham,UKReceived23December2003;revised26March2004;accepted27July2004Availab
leonline14October2004Theneuralsystemunderlyingfaceperceptionmustrepresenttheunchanging
featuresofafacethatspecifyidentity,aswellasthechangeableaspectsofafacethatfacilitates
ocialcommunication.However,thewayinformationaboutfacesisrepresentedinthebrainremainsc
ontroversial.Inthisstudy,weusedfMRadaptation(thereductioninfMRIactivitythatfollowsthe
repeatedpresentationofidenticalimages)toaskhowdifferentface-andobject-selectiveregionsofvisualcortexcontributetospecificaspectsoffaceperception'
The data is spit out by callbacks so if I print each string as it is returned it looks like this:
'The
-571.3
neural
-573.7
system
-577.4
underly
13.9
ing
-577.2
face
-573.0
perc
13.7
eption
-574.9
must
-572.1
repr
20.8
esent
-577.0
the
unchangin
14.4
g
-538.5
featur
16.5
es
-529.5
of
-536.6
a
-531.4
face
'
On examination it looks like the true spaces are large negative numbers < -300 and the false spaces are much smaller positive numbers. Thanks guys. Just getting to the point where i am asking the question clearly helped me answer it!
Hmmmm... I'd have to say that guessing is never a good idea. Looking at the problem root cause and solving that is the answer, anything else is a kludge.
If the spacing is unreliable from the PDF, how is it unreliable? The PDF viewer needs to be able to reliably space the text so the data is there somewhere, you just need to find it.
EDIT following comment:
The idea of parsing the file using a dictionary (your only other option really, apart from randomly inserting spaces and hoping for the best) and inserting spaces at identified word boundaries (a real problem when dealing with punctuation, plurals that don't alter the base word i.e. plural, etc) would, I believe, be a much greater programming challenge than correctly parsing the PDF in the first place. After all, PDF is clearly defined whereas English is somewhat wooly.
Why not look down the route of existing solutions like ps2ascii in linux, call the function from your Ruby and pick up the result.
PDF doesn't only store spaces as space characters, but also uses layout commands for spacing (so it doesn't print a space, but moves the "pen" to the right). Perhaps you should have a look at the PDF reference (the big PDF on the bottom of the site), Chapter 9 "Text" should be what you're looking for.
EDIT: After reading your comment to Lazarus' answer, this doesn't seem to be what you're looking for. I think you should try to get a word list from somewhere and try to split your text using it. A good strategy would be to do that using recursion, because for example:
"meandyou"
The first word could be "me" or "mean", but if you try "mean", "dyou" doesn't make sense, so it will be "me", same for the next word that could be "a" or "an" or "and", only "and" makes sense.
If it were me I'd go back to the source PDFs and try a different method of extracting the text, such as iText (for Java) or maybe some kind of PDF-to-HTML to text conversion software method.