Book Design and Imaging
Print quality of EAN barcodes: images versus fonts?Greetings, I couldn’t find this exact question in a forum search. Many threads here talk about getting a raster (PNG, etc.) image of a barcode at 300 dpi, and plopping that as an image on the back cover. In my experience a raster image will never be printed as sharply as vector text, so I wondered if any of the forum regulars could speak to the final print quality of having tried one or both. Naturally as long as the barcode will scan properly, that is acceptable. I certainly have the skill to build a barcode myself with fonts and textboxes in Booksmart, I would just rather not spend the time since I already have a nice image. :-) Cheers 
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BookSmart only accepts .JPG or .PNG, there is no way of inserting your raster file – so you’ll need recreate or convert your barcode. I’d recommend .PNG as it uses a lossless compression algorythm and thus scales better than JPG when you place it on the back cover (assuming you might want to scale it). There’s no need to fiddle with fonts etc, there’s lots of web sites that’ll generate one for you. You could try this one…… http://www.terryburton.co.uk/barcodewriter/generator/, there’s no charge (unlike some). The wording in the instructions is obscure to say the least, but it has the advantage of being able to generate a .PNG So use Symbology ISBN Contents is your ISBN Leave the other fields with their default values Click Make Barcode then click download as PNG. The resultant print is fine, no obvious raster artifacts. …..Tony |
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Thanks kindly Tony. That confirms everything I had in mind. |
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EAN barcode generator for 12 digits Components, supporting png, jpg, bmp, and gif image export. |
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