RE: Suggestions on embedding barcode fonts

[Ian Rowlands <ia...@viridian.com.au>]

The XSL you pointed out seems to do the trick. It looks a little bit
uglier, but it definitely works. Thanks for the suggestion.

Regards,

Ian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: J.Pietschmann [mailto:j3322ptm@yahoo.de] 
> Sent: Tuesday, 27 August 2002 05:22
> To: fop-user@xml.apache.org
> Subject: Re: Suggestions on embedding barcode fonts
> 
> 
> Ian Rowlands wrote:
> > I'm trying to use FOP to produce barcodes (EAN-13) in a PDF 
> document.
> 
> Commercial barcode fonts seem to be the cause of much
> harm and trouble...
> 
> > 2. Fonts from IDAutomation. They seem great but when I try to embed
> > them, it complains that the font can't be found. The font is on the 
> > path, and in the C:\Windows\Fonts directory (although I'm not 
> > referencing it there). I use a similar configuration to the 
> one I used 
> > above, so the fonts should be found.
> 
> Whatever path you mean, FOP does not search it. It will
> look up exactly the file (for embed) or the URL (for metrics) 
> which you gave. If you supplied absolute path/URL, than 
> either the font *not* there. Note that the presence of a font 
> in C:\Windows\Fonts does *not* necessarily mean the font file 
> can be accessed with "C:\Windows\Fonts\foo.ttf", it can be in 
> any other directory as long as you used Window's font 
> installer to make it known to the system. There could also be 
> some obscure failure modes when reading the font file which 
> are reported as "file not found", but you'll have to check 
> for this in the source yourself.
> 
> > 3. Fonts from ABRI. Used a similar configuration but it 
> complains that
> > the PDF is not constructed correctly.
> Whats the complete error message?
> 
> > Does anybody have experience with embedding fonts for 
> producing EAN-13 
> > barcodes? We haven't settled on a purchase yet (but would 
> like to do so 
> > once we can produce the PDF's we need to).
> The usual problem is that many barcode fonts do not have
> Unicode maps or seem to violate other parts of the TTF spec.
> If you've generated a metric file successfully, it should
> work though. FOP does not look into the font file itself,
> only the metrics generator does.
> 
> A simple and cheap work around is use XSLT to generate an
> embedded SVG or a FO table representing the barcode:
>   http://www.renderx.com/barcodes.html
> 
> J.Pietschmann
> 
>