#166 Human readable text missing from zint-qt Databar Expanded Stacked

[Jeff Gibbons]

I noticed that from zint-qt the human readable text does not appear for Databar Expanded Stacked, in either the image window or the resulting SVG file.

My zint was built yesterday.
'git status' reports up-to-date with 'origin/master'.

Images of zint-qt and the resulting barcode image file are attached.

Cheers
Jeff

[C. Scharenberg]

I observe the same issue.

When I create a Databar Expanded Stacked barcode (type 81) with the frontend command line tool, no human readable text gets shown in the generated PNG file. But in the GS1 specification all sample barcodes are shown with the related text below.

When I use the backend with the option enabled to show the human readable text, the text gets shown but I observe two problems:

• The GS1 Application Identifier is shown in square brackets rather than in parentheses.
• If the text length exceeds the available width of the barcode, it gets wrapped around, thus overlapping with itself.

The barcode itself can be scanned correctly.

To show the problem, I have added two barcode images generated with the Zint backend using my own code:

• "databar_expanded_stacked_ai11.bmp" shows the square brackets.
• "databar_expanded_stacked_ai91.bmp" shows the wrap-around effect. The encoded text is "Visit at: http://zint.org.uk/" (GS1-AI 91).

I must admit, that I am using a quite old version of Zint from November 2018 (GIT snapshot, roundabout version 2.6.3). But it seems that this problem still exists.

An acceptable solution could be to render the human readable text by default (with parentheses of course) and extend the width of the generated image to the extent required by the text.

[Robin Stuart]

Hi,

IMHO Zint should not include HRT for any of the stacked symbologies. If it can be made to do so for Databar Expanded Stacked then this is a bug. The emphasis with Zint is to take the data and convert it into a barcode symbol - the HRT functionality was primarily added to ensure correct formatting with EAN and UPC, but is also available for other linear symbols. I imagine that Zint will normally be used to generate a symbol to form part of some larger document, in which case the data to be encoded can be referenced by a seperate field which could be placed below the symbol if that is what's required by the application, or anywhere else on the document. This should be done by the calling application rather than by Zint. That way the user can have much better control over placement, fonts, font size and colour of the text, all of which are more to do with document design than generating barcodes.

Robin.