Treepoem
A cleverly named, but very simple python barcode renderer wrapping the
BWIPP library and ghostscript
command line tool, Python 2.7 and 3.3+
compatible.
Installation
Install from pip:
pip install treepoem
You'll also need Ghostscript installed. On Ubuntu/Debian this can be installed with:
apt-get install ghostscript
On Mac OS X use:
brew install ghostscript
Otherwise refer to your distribution's package manager, though it's likely to
be called ghostscript
too.
API
generate_barcode(barcode_type, data, options=None)
Generates a barcode and returns it as a PIL image file object (specifically, a
PIL.EpsImagePlugin.EpsImageFile
).
barcode_type
is the name of the barcode type to generate (see below).
data
is a str
(Python 2 unicode
) or bytes
(Python 2 bytes
)
of data to embed in the barcode - the amount that can be embedded varies by
type.
options
is a dictionary of strings-to-strings of extra options to be passed
to BWIPP, as per its docs.
For example, this generates a QR code image, and saves it to a file using
standard PIL Image.save()
:
>>> import treepoem
>>> image = treepoem.generate_barcode(
... barcode_type='qrcode', # One of the BWIPP supported codes.
... data='barcode payload',
... )
>>> image.convert('1').save('barcode.png')
If your barcode image is monochrome, with no additional text or
coloring, converting the Image
object to monochrome as shown above
(image.convert('1')
) will likely reduce its file size.
barcode_types
This is a dict
of the ~100 names of the barcode types that the vendored
version of BWIPP supports: its keys are str
s of the barcode type encoder
names, and the values are instances of BarcodeType
.
BarcodeType
A class representing meta information on the types. It has two attributes:
type_code
- the value needed for thebarcode_type
argument ofgenerate_barcode()
to use this type.description
- the human level description of the type which has twostr
.
Only these common types are used in the test suite:
qrcode
- QR Codeazteccode
- Aztec Codepdf417
- PDF417interleaved2of5
- Interleaved 2 of 5code128
- Code 128code39
- Code 39
Command-line interface
Treepoem also includes a simple command-line interface to the
functionality of generate_barcode
. For example, these commands
will generate two QR codes with identical contents, but different levels
of error correction (see QR Code Options):
$ treepoem -o barcode1.png -t qrcode "This is a test" eclevel=H
$ treepoem -o barcode2.png -t qrcode "^084his is a test" eclevel=L parse
Complete usage instructions are shown with treepoem --help
.
What's so clever about the name?
Barcode.
Bark ode.
Tree poem.