Easy Gbarcode

A few posts ago I had mentioned that my Gbarcode project should really be a bit more user friendly as well as provide an easy way to create PNGs without loading memory hogging libraries like RMagick. I investigated using the Cairo libraries for this here.

Good news for every one that uses Gbarcode, and those thinking of using it, I created a small wrapper module that is more Ruby-ish and also uses Cairo to print out to PNG. The functionality is bare-bones, with a fixed height of 150 pixels and width is determined by the length of the encoded barcode. It works well for Code 128 barcodes. Grab the ruby file here.

To use this module, here is an example (note that bad encoding schemes will result in a raised excpetion, hence the begin/rescue block):

require 'gbc'
require 'gbarcode'
require 'markaby'

begin
b = GBC::Barcode.new(ARGV[0], Gbarcode::BARCODE_ANY)
puts b.ascii, b.partial, b.encoding
b.to_png("out.png")
b = Markaby::Builder.new()
b.html do
body do
img(:src => "out.png")
end
end
f = File.open("out.html","w")
f.write(b.to_s)
f.close
rescue Exception => e
puts e.message
end