Treepoem

A cleverly named, but very simple python barcode renderer wrapping the BWIPP library and ghostscript command line tool.

Installation

Install from pip:

python -m pip install treepoem

Python 3.8 to 3.12 supported.

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.

There's a known issue with rendering on Ghostscript 9.22+ where images are smeared. See GitHub Issue #124 and its associated links for more details. Ghostscript merged a fix in version 9.26 and common barcodes seem to work from then on, though still with some smearing.

You can check your Ghostscript version with:

gs --version

Working on a Django project? Improve your skills with one of my books.

API

generate_barcode(barcode_type: str, data: str | bytes, options: dict[str, str | bool] | None=None) -> EpsImageFile

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 or 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: dict[str, BarcodeType]

This is a dict of the ~100 names of the barcode types that the vendored version of BWIPP supports: its keys are strs 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 the barcode_type argument of generate_barcode() to use this type.
• description - the human level description of the type which has two str.

Only these common types are used in the test suite:

• qrcode - QR Code
• azteccode - Aztec Code
• pdf417 - PDF417
• interleaved2of5 - Interleaved 2 of 5
• code128 - Code 128
• code39 - 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.

Updating BWIPP

For development of treepoem, when there's a new BWIPP release:

1. Download the latest monolithic zip file from https://github.com/bwipp/postscriptbarcode/releases
2. Unzip the files into src/treepoem/postscriptbarcode
3. Remove the unneded docs subdirectory.
4. Run make_data.py from the root of the repo to update the barcode types that treepoem knows about.
5. Add a CHANGELOG note about the upgrade.
6. Commit and make a pull request, for examples see https://github.com/adamchainz/treepoem/pulls?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+upgrade+bwipp