Re: [seul-edu] Cafeteria Software?

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

Just wanted to jump in here with a detail -- the barcode stuff is a piece of
cake. Typical barcode readers have the barcode interpretation stuff in
firmware, and they output standard ASCII to STDIN. So you just program to
read ordinary input, same as you would a keyboard.

For printing barcodes you have two options:

        there are several free packages that print barcodes to           
                regular printers; Gnu Barcode is the best known,
                and I've also tried a Perl package for this. The
                limitation is that ordinary laser prinsters have
                relatively coarse line resolution for barcode
                printing. My 600-DPI printer was OK, but a 300-DPI
                one my friend bought was terrible.

        dedicated barcode printers exist, though they aren't cheap.
                The one I looked at for a friend proved to be
                very easy to write custom programs for in perl. The
                printer had its own, fairly simple-to-learn command 
                language for all barcoding features. Much better
                line resolution than my 600 DPI LaserJet 4.
                

At 03:18 PM 8/22/00 -0700, Jeff Knox wrote:
> If they scan
>barcodes it becomes more difficult but not much. I know at Clark College we
>have a barcode scanner that scans the student ids and it imputs the number
>it scanned into a web form that is processed by perl. So it should be fairly
>easy to find a barcode system that just paste what it scans into a field in
>any program or web form.


--
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA           	 	         ray@comarre.com        
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