Barcodes
Barcodes are commonly used to label photo mask or devices. Creating it by hand would be hard job. But with the LayoutEditor a automatic creation is very simple. Many different barcodes (1d and 2d code) are already included. Any other barcode can be loaded very easy.
Supported Barcodes
Generation of these bar code is already included in the LayoutEditor:
Choose the wanted bar code from the utilities menu to generate it. Please see the documentation section for each bar code for details. One dimensional bar code can also be read. A shift left mouse click will read it along the display horizontal line.
Using an external Barcode Generator
Many different bar code generators exists. Some are stand alone software programs, some other are web based with a browser interface. All these generators produce as a result an image. This image can be a JPEG file, a PNG Graphic or any other bitmap format existing. To use these graphic within the LayoutEditor the bars (or boxes/pixel in 2D codes) need to be painted and the rest must be transparent. Such a graphic format is often included in the bar code generator. However if it is not included, it is still not problem to use. You can pre-process the barcode graphic with any image software or post process it within the LayoutEditor. |
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Pre-Processing the Image
Optional, if the generated image has no transparency, you can add this with most imaging software. Here GIMP will be used. The steps are very basic: add an alpha-channel (layer add alpha-channel), select by color, cut selection, save the result. |
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Loading into the LayoutEditor
In the first step set the preferred scaling in the setup. At fileformat/pixel you can set the size which every pixel of a imported bar code bitmap should have. This will be the width of a single bar with you have generated the code with one pixel per bar. Afterwards you can attach the image via AttachFile. A new cell will be generated with the bar code. |
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Post-Procssing within the LayoutEditor
Now the layer can be adjusted on which the code is required. With choosing the target layer, SelectAll and MoveToLayer the bar code will be moved to the correct layer. If you don't have used a transparent image you will get two layers after attaching the image. You need to delete the non required layer to get a correct bar code.
