Generating barcodes with ruby and rails

Recently I had to convert some functionality from an old MS Access system to a Ruby on Rails application. The Access system generated a report that included a barcode; they were using a barcode font installed on the machine running access. I figured generating the barcode server side in the web app was going to be much nicer than installing barcode fonts on the client browsers. And since this is Ruby, I figured...

There must be a gem for that 

Sure enough, the barby gem. It allows you to output your barcode as png, gif, svg, pdf, etc...

In my case I generated png barcodes and included image references to those in my view files.

Sample code

	# Gemfile, run bundle install after adding
	gem 'barby'
	gem 'chunky_png'
	# some code to generate the png file using 3 of 9 barcode style
	require 'barby'
	require 'barby/barcode/code_39'
	require 'barby/outputter/png_outputter'
	barcode_value = "099999333"
	full_path = "/somewhere/barcode_#{barcode_value}.png"
	barcode = Barby::Code39.new(barcode_value)
	File.open(full_path, 'w') { |f| f.write barcode.to_png(:margin => 3, :xdim => 2, :height => 55) }

view raw using_barby_to_generate_barcodes_with_ruby.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

There is no pixel setting, it uses some other type of unit to determine size; using the xdim, margin and height options you can tweak the size, but I found that it was not very precise - for my use case it was good enough.

The generated barcode does not include the value, it is just the image which can be scanned using a barcode scanner, but it would be nice if there was an option to include the value below that. This is somewhat trivial to add in your view using html.

Overall I was really pleased with this gem!

Resources

• http://toretore.eu/barby/
• https://github.com/toretore/barby
• http://barby.rubyforge.org/rdoc/
• http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-barby