Introduction

This package was created to have barcodes available without having PIL (Python Imaging Library) installed. As of version 0.4b1 PIL is also supported for creating barcodes.

All you need to create a barcode is to know the system (EAN, UPC, ...) and the code (e.g. for EAN-13: 123456789102). As you see, you do not need the checksum, it will be calculated automatically. In some systems (Code 39) the checksum is optional, there you can give the add_checksum keyword argument (default is True).

As of version 0.7beta3 Python 3 is supported, but not well tested.

Creating barcodes as SVG

To generate barcodes as SVG objects, you can use the default writer (simply not specify a writer).

Quick example:

>>> import barcode
>>> ean = barcode.get('ean13', '123456789102')
# Now we look if the checksum was added
>>> ean.get_fullcode()
u'1234567891026'
>>> filename = ean.save('ean13')
>>> filename
u'ean13.svg'
>>> options = dict(compress=True)
>>> filename = ean.save('ean13', options)
>>> filename
u'ean13.svgz'

Now you have ean13.svg and the compressed ean13.svgz in your current working directory. Open it and see the result.

Creating barcodes as Image

New in version 0.4b1.

To generate barcodes as images, you must provide the ImageWriter to the get function. Without any options, the images are rendered as PNG.

Quick example:

>>> import barcode
>>> from barcode.writer import ImageWriter
>>> ean = barcode.get('ean13', '123456789102', writer=ImageWriter())
>>> filename = ean.save('ean13')
>>> filename
u'ean13.png'