News

28/12/2008

Development has been slow over the Christmas period but some progress has been made. I have been looking at the procedures for outputting the symbols to EPS and PNG files and have made some improvements.

The "box" and "bind" options have recieved an overhaul and now produce results much which are much more useful and intuitive. Zint no longer tries to put row binding on Data Matrix and QR Code symbols! These options also now work with Maxicode symbols in the same way as they do for every other symbology. By popular demand a "scale" option has been added to control the size of the output symbol. This works nicely with EPS output and allows complete control over the symbol size. PNG output is a little more tricky: text size and Maxicode symbols in PNG remain unaffected by changes in scale.

Also added to the CVS version are options to dump either EPS or PNG versions of the symbol directly to "stdout" to allow it to be captured with a pipe.

Korea Post barcodes have made a return to Zint and are now available as barcode number 77.

One major change which developers which use the Zint API should be aware of is that the conversion routines which handle Unicode have now moved from the front end to the back end. This means that text entered using the API which includes Latin-1 characters will now need to be pre-formatted in UTF-8 rather than using extended ASCII. This represents the first step towards supporting the ANSI Extended Channel Interpretations standard which allows encoding of many characters not included in Latin-1. It is hoped that this move will also allow the encoding of difficult characters like NULL and FNC2 to be supported in later versions of the code.

18/11/2008

Version 2.0 is available to download now! Get it from Sourceforge

15/11/2008

SITE NEWS

Added News Archive Page

09/11/2008

Welcome to our new-look website. A lot of work has been done to make this site much easier to keep up-to-date so news items should appear more often.

Meanwhile development of the library has continued and, as of now, we are very close to releasing version 2.0. This version will not only feature Aztec Code (which, unlike the beta releases, actually works now!), Code 32 and Codablock-F but also Micro QR Code, Aztec Runes and Data Matrix ECC 000-140. There has also been lots of furious bugfixing going on which makes Zint 2.0 much more stable than 1.6. A fitting release to mark the projects second birthday!

19/08/2008

Aztec Code is on its Way (Again!!!). I have finally recieved the ISO standard, thanks to BogDan Vatra and development will start soon.