
#UPC A GENERATOR CODE#
However, printing vertical bars meant that the smears would only increase the bar height and the code would still be readable. A major reason they didn’t stay for long is that the printers would sometimes smear the ink and that would render the code unreadable. There was also a proposal for a circular bullseye barcode in the early days. The follow-up versions included a bunch of fun types of barcodes. One of the early versions just extended the dots to form vertical lines. The idea for encoding this information in the form of bars originated from morse code. No doubt the barcode later found huge commercial success in the retail industry! The idea for an automated entry system (barcode) originated when a Drexel student overheard a food chain owner asking for a system to automatically read product information during checkout. However, it took over twenty years before this invention became commercially successful. The invention was based on Morse code that was extended to thin and thick bars. The barcode was invented by Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver and patented in the US in 1951. It seems like barcodes have been there even before I was born.
#UPC A GENERATOR HOW TO#
I will take you on a guided tour of how a barcode works and how to create a super simple barcode generator for the Universal Product Code (UPC-A) using pure Python.ĭisclaimer: I have borrowed some code and ideas from Hugo for this article. This article is in a similar vein as my “Understanding and Decoding a JPEG Image using Python” article. There is no substitute for learning more about something by creating it from scratch so that is exactly what I did. It seemed like I would learn a lot from diving deeper and implementing a barcode generator from scratch. I have known for a long time about how they work in theory but I never did enough research on it. Hi everyone! 👋 I have always been fascinated by barcodes and QR codes. Understanding and Generating a UPC-A barcode using Python April 12, 2021
