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Claris Engage 2025 - March 25-26 Austin Texas ×

Generate Scalable PDF Barcodes Purely with Calculations


Have you ever dreamed of being able to generate high quality scalable barcodes in FileMaker solely using calculations, with no plug-ins, fast enough, in a way compatible with server-side scripts, FileMaker Go and FileMaker WebDirect, and completely free of charge? Your dream has just come true...

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There are various solutions for barcodes already available, from special barcode fonts, through Brian Dunning’s custom functions using rotated underscore as a symbol primitive, various web services such as those mentioned in Anders Monsen’s article, to the award-winning Barcode Creator, and now even JavaScript based Barcode Generator add-on built into FileMaker Pro 19. But each of the existing solutions actually had some limitation I did not feel comfortable about, whether it was cost, dependency on internet connection, generation performance, poor quality of the result, or inability to generate barcodes in server-side scripts. Just as an example, how quickly can you find a way to generate QR code, which looks good at any scale, with no tiny white lines between individual pixels?

Like this one: 

QRcode.pdf

As a tech-nerd who loves to achieve the impossible, I really could not resist the opportunity to find out whether I could build a https://24usw.com/pdfbarwfnew solution, not having a single one of these limitations. So I created this example, generating barcodes solely with custom functions:

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It works off-line, in server-side scripts, with WebDirect, and does not need to use Web Viewer, plug-in or external service.

If you want to try it out, watch my video on how to use it, and read the whole story of how I created it, click here to check my original article.

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