I am starting the process of writing an application, one part of which is to decode bar codes, however I'm off to a bad start. I am no bar code expert and this is not a common bar code type, so I'm in trouble. I cannot figure out what type of bar code this is, which I have to decode.
I have looked on Wikipedia and some other sites with visual descriptions of different types of bar codes (and how to identify them), however I cannot identify it. Please note that I have tried several free bar code decoding programs and they have all failed to decode this.
So here is a picture of that bar code:
alt text http://www.shrani.si/f/2B/4p/4UCVyP72/barcode.jpg
I hope one of you can recognize it. Also if anyone has worked with this before and knows of a library that can decode them (from an image), I'd love to hear about them.
I'm very thankful for any additional pointers I can receive. Thank you.
zbar thinks it's Code 128 but the decoded string is suspiciously different than the barcode's own caption. Maybe it's a charset difference?
~/src/zebra-0.5/zebraimg$ ./zebraimg ~/src/barcode/reader/barcode.jpg
CODE-128:10657958011502540742
scanned 1 barcode symbols from 1 images in 0.04 seconds
My old copy was called zebra but the library is now called zbar. http://sourceforge.net/projects/zbar/
I don't recognize this bar code - but here are a few sites that might help you (libraries etc.) - assuming you use C# and .NET (you didn't specify in your question):
http://www.idautomation.com/csharp/
http://www.bokai.com/barcode.net.htm
It looks a bit like Code 128 but http://www.onlinebarcodereader.com/ does not recognize it as such. Maybe the image quality isn't good enough.
If you are using Java:
http://code.google.com/p/zxing/
Open Source, supports multiple types of barcodes
A list of software can be found here:
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Bar_Code/Decoding/
IANABCE (I Am Not A Barcode Expert), but looking at the barcodes here, I'd say this looks closest to the UCC/EAN-128 symbology, character set 'C'.
Do you know what the barcode is used for? What's the application domain?
Related
Back in the late eighties I seem to remember using a unix utility method named 'banner' - (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_(Unix) It basically took a string of text and 'rendered' it as a larger text 'banner' using each character as blocks to form the original character. It was usually used at the start of print runs to create a heading for multi-sheet reports.
Does anyone know of a C# library that reproduces this functionality?
I remember a similar thing on the VAX mainframes at college. useful with a roomful of people banging in Pascal programs on VT100 terminals, and only one matrix printer behind closed doors in the hallowed office where the IT staff worked.
Anyway, this is a C# ASCII art creator - if you could find a way of rendering your text to a graphic file you could then convert it.
You probably could invoke a free software C program doing the same, perhaps figlet
Just for my personal interest, I see from my research that it's not that easy to start your own OCR. However, I would like to hear ideas on how to achieve the challenge of not just recognising characters, but also giving back the results in the formatted string.
For example, I have an image of a table (imagine that it's an image with "|" and "_" being drawn straight lines):
|Number, AnotherNumber|Some Text|
|1,4 |Blah |
And after using a silent OCR, I get the result as "|Number, AnotherNumber|SomeText|\n|1,4|Blah|"
Any ideas of how could I achieve this, and what available tools/libraries I could make use of? I also would like to write this in C# with Visual Studio 2010. And ideally to work with PDFs but different image formats are fine. I've already looked at some, but they seem non-compatible as they use C++ or C.
Thank you.
Alina.
getting ocr libaries is quite hard (of course just if you dont pant to pay for it)
you could try this one, its not free but if you have office 2007:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/41709/How-To-Use-Office-2007-OCR-Using-C
I'm developing an application for Windows Phone that are using different kinds of math problems, such as hard equations. The thing is that I want this app to be nice and cool and therefor It's obviously that you can't use the * (snowflake) as the multiplication symbol and you can't use the ^ (roof-top) as the exponent symbol. No, what I want is that I want to parse equations into cool images. I mean like this:
I know that there are several ways to parse math, including Latex, MathML and many more, I do also know that there are many javascript based strategies to create images like this, but I still haven't found one that are compatible with Windows Phone 7 based on C#. And I don't want to have anything server based, I want the conversion between equation to an image to be done in the client.
If you have any suggestions please leave a answer.
So the "*" becomes a "."? Not sure whether that's cooler or not but you still don't need an image generator, a nice font will do.
I am trying to use Graphics.DrawString and TextRenderer.DrawText to laydown on a fixed rectangle some strings with variable number of characters.
However, even using the GDI+ wrapping methods I am not satisfied with result: I would need to control the font kerning (or string character spacing) to give a chance to pack high number of characters strings.
I read about FontStretches but I do not know how to use in winform. Another method is Typography.SetKerning but again I am blank about using it.
Can someone help?!
Round 2:
I know it could be hard, Win32 API has a freetype support which could be the solution to issue.
Practically my aim is to do something similar to "http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4582545/kerning-problems-when-drawing-text-character-by-character", in .NET. Notice that I am working on pre-formed string of arabic language, not user character imput.
My problem is:
(1) identify which library has the wanted kerning function (most probably gdi32.dll), (2) build a c# safe environment to deal with dll calls, (3) implement a call to dll that works in c#.
Can someone help?
Thank you for answering.
If you look at the documentation, its quite easy to find out which does what, and how to use it.
The method Typography.SetKerning is an WPF-only thing, so you won't be able to use it in WinForms.
A quick Google found this article, which shows us how to modify kerning values to GDI text.
first excuse me for the bad english, then i wanna ask you a piece of advice to solve this problem. I'm trying to use zxing C# port.
I tried then to parse this image:
bar code http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/2633/0003gby.jpg
at zxing.org which recognized it.
The little program I wrote, instead produced a ReaderException.
Any ideas, or anybody who wrote a piece of code which does the job?
I realize this is a bit old, but I've just tried using ZXing's C# port for the first time, and I've found that I have to use the TRY_HARDER DecodeHintType to get the barcode to read.
In the code, it looks like it's expecting the image provided to be a region around the barcode itself, so it starts looking in the middle. Setting the TRY_HARDER flag makes it search the entire page.