dustymc
commented
7 months ago more difficult problem than I would have expected
Yes it is.
something Arctos wants to be responsible for
Not really, the normal pathway (installing some java-bits) it would mean a more complicated recipe for building servers and some security stuff to worry about (and the thing that many of those libraries use had a HUGE incident kinda-recently). That's definitely not "no" but it would be enough of a sustainability impact that I think we'd need to discuss with The Community and TACC.
I googled 'barcode api' or something of the sort, that lead me to https://barcodeapi.org/index.html, I built https://arctos-test.tacc.utexas.edu/Reports/reporter.cfm?action=edit&report_id=191 --> https://arctos-test.tacc.utexas.edu/Reports/reporter.cfm?action=view&report_id=191&table_name=whatever - not a clue if they want $$ at some level or if that's still there or anything else, but I was able to make my browser display something that sorta looks like a barcode in a couple minutes....
acdoll
campmlc
I've been wondering if we could print barcodes right out of Arctos for our labels and reports (e.g., https://arctos.database.museum/Reports/reporter.cfm?action=edit&report_id=57, https://arctos.database.museum/Reports/reporter.cfm?action=edit&report_id=190). It seems like this is a more difficult problem than I would have expected. The most common solution I have found is something like 'generate images server side to generate the bar codes' and then insert the png into your html. I don't imagine that is something Arctos wants to be responsible for (or is it?). Anyway, I stumbled upon this GitHub: https://github.com/zingl/2D-Barcode/blob/master/barcode.html and am wondering if there is something useful in there for maybe making this work. It appears (?) to utilize another webpage (http://www.w3.org/2000/svg) to encode the text, but that page appears to be retired.
I've been shooting for using data matrix barcodes because they can be printed pretty small and still be readable by our scanners. If there is a more simple solution to get 1d barcodes, that would probably work fine for most of our needs. I would appreciate any suggestions or advice.