Re: [Gnumed-devel] Barcode printing

[Ian Haywood]

Sebastian Hilbert wrote:
> On Tuesday 04 October 2005 13:57, Adrian Midgley wrote:
> you are about to do with lab barcodes would be immediately useful for my
> parent's practive. Our lab gives out barcodes/stickers and returns the string 
> (number) via online lab data fetching. 
> 
>>I'm looking at 2D barcoding for forms now.
> 
> Regarding the document archive.  GNUmed's document archive produces a 
> hopefully unique identifier for paper documents. Right now we are wrriting 
> down this identifier by hand. I have been looking at scanners which can print 
> labels/barcodes as they scan in the document. 
> 
> I envisione something like this :
> 
> Using a sheet-fed scanner (double sided maybe) I will scan in a bunch of 
> documents. To separate the bunch I thought about putting a black/white sheet 
> inbetween logically connected paper sheets. This would serve as separator 
> sheet to the software. I have researched this and it should be possible.
Could you not mark the separations in software (you have to view them anyway to 
match to patient)
which is then reflected in printed barcodes for each page.
Point is you could have a whole bundle of pages to scan which you never have to 
manually separate.

> Then I would feed the bunch of sheets to standard printer which in turn would 
> apply the barcodes to each sheet. The scanning process would generate the 
> barcodes and keep a list for printing.
That's a clever idea.
The danger is any disturbance of the order between scanning and printing.
Maybe better to have the page printed straightaway with a "page ID"
(you could bolt the multipage scanner to the printer so it drops the page
straight into the printer's in tray)


More generally, it's been our plan for a while to use LaTeX for printing
complex forms. This is probably overkill for a small dedicated barcode-printer,
but if you're printing A4 or near-A4 path requests it's worth a look.
Working code exists at gnumed/gnumed/client/business/gmForms.py.
LaTeX already has some simple barcode fonts, plus it can embed
postscript such as generated by pdf417_encode, I am happy to work on this if
you are interested.


> Most of the code is there already. Scanning works. Indexing works. Viewing 
> works. See Wiki. What has to be done is the barcode printing part. For that 
> part it doesn't matter if one uses a highprofile multipage scanner or scans 
> page by page.
> 
> To avoid code duplication regarding your project I would be glad to be 
> involved early.
> 
> Regards,
> Sebastian

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