Legacy ImageMagick Discussions Archive

Hi there, I'm using a barcode font and it draws standard characters fine however it gives me an invalid characters at the ends for this string: "šB-00015zœ"

I'm using this command: convert -font=Code128bWin.ttf -encoding=Unicode -draw=text 100,100 'šB-00015zœ' input.bmp output.bmp
Produces box-characters at the ends but barcode in the middle. I've tried other truetype fonts with the same results.

Any help on this? I'm using ImageMagickObject on Windows.

This would be a issue with the font not with IM, which is only using the font.

Barcodes I believe are simply numbers with a special start/end sequence.
That is all. so using š (s with two dots about it) is probably invalid and thus
the fonts 'invalid character' (a box) is displayed.

anthony wrote:This would be a issue with the font not with IM, which is only using the font.

Barcodes I believe are simply numbers with a special start/end sequence.
That is all. so using š (s with two dots about it) is probably invalid and thus
the fonts 'invalid character' (a box) is displayed.

Hmmm I'm not so sure about that.

Barcodes have a start and end character, along with a checksum and the numbers. Sometimes the checksum becomes an invalid character when calculated.

Also as a test I c/p the text into Gimp with the barcode font and it showed up fine.

Edit: as another test I switched the font to a standard unicode font and I'm still getting the invalid characters. I suspect some kind of conversion is going on.

what version of IM and what version of GS are you using? Are they the latest?

I'm using IM 6.5.4-Q16 and GS 8.64.

Should be the latest.

Is there anyway to pass it in as hex?

I have just tried a couple of online barcode generator and I get:

http://www.barcoding.com/upc/

Error creating barcode.
A common problem is that the specified value can't be encoded with the selected format.

This one worked Ok;
http://www.idautomation.com/java/linearservlet.html

http://www.tec-it.com/online-demos/tbar ... px?LANG=en

Bar code generator error
Input contains unsuported characters

Some info: http://www.idautomation.com/code128faq.html

So Imagemagick is not the ony software that has problems.

Hrm. I think I might just manually edit the font file...

E: Thanks for your help Bonzo and everyone.