Barcode Generation

Foobar is a piece of software used to produce barcode on a PCL printer. To install it, you have to compile the source code with the GNU GCC compiler (if you don't have this compiler, click here ). Foobar was developped by Frederik MJ Sauer. You can access his homepage here. It contains usefull information. I have modified his program so it can print human readable format below the actual barcode (see the following exemples). You can download my version by clicking on this link.
Using Foobar is fairly simple. You need 3 steps.

1 ) Modify your application source code :
You want your application to produce barcode. Add to your application output the following string [FOOBAR;DATA="string"] at the exact location where you want the barcode to appear. You have to replace "string" with your product code, for example : [FOOBAR;DATA=TEST123]. This will produce a barcode for product TEST123

2 ) Parsing your output through Foobar :
You need now to parse your output through foobar. It will replace the string you inserted ( [FOOBAR;DATA=TEST123] ) with the actual PCL code. To do that use the unix redirections :
foobar < YourApplicationOutput > FinalOutputFile

3 ) Send your file to the printer.

To illustrate the whole process and to allow you to test it, here is a complete command line that will print out an example :
echo "A pretty [FOOBAR;DATA=*123AC*] example" | foobar | lp -d myprinter
Instaed of foobar, you can use foobar -H to add a human readable format barcode to the barcode. Here are 2 examples. The first one is the output produced by the example line above, the second is the same line with foobar -H.