Indesign Barcode Plugins

[Guest]

Hi,

I'm looking for a easy to use Indesign Barcode Plugin that can quickly and easily generate barcodes within a table in Indesign. I have 25 pages of UPCs already listed in tables and just need them converted into barcodes. Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,

-R

[John Hawkinson]

This is not directly responsive.

I would suggest you find an external program that batch genrates barcode images, produce a spreadsheet, and use either InDesign's data merge or scripting to insert them in your layout. At least that's how I'd do it...

But I'm not personally familiar with barcode plugins. Perhaps you can find one that does what you need.

[John Hawkinson]

Oh, I guess another one that people talk about is http://teacupsoftware.com/products/barcodemaker1_0.html.

[Guest]

This was actually the original one I was trying out but it doesn't work within tables. I contacted support and they told me the best way to get around it was to draw an inline graphic box and copy and paste the numeric string for each UPC. Worked well if you have 1-3 pages but if you have 20+ pages it takes quite a bit of time.

[John Hawkinson]

I really know nothing about this software, but perhaps you can do it as tab-delimited text and then use Convert Text to Table.

[Stix_Hart]

I use BookBarcode Pro and love it.  I'm not sure if it works in Tables or not and aren't by my machine that has it on to test, but it works well with Data Merge, except you only have to merge in a numeric string and it will find it and convert it to a barcode, easier than merging an image IMO.

[Guest]

Would you know of a tutorial I can follow to use this program within a table? I tried messing around with it and found it to be a bit complicated especially since I've never data merged a document before.

[Stix_Hart]

No I don't know of any such tutorials.  Just because you've got your data in a table now doesn't mean that is the only way to do it.  I would start from scratch, learn how to data merge, then batch process.  But you have to have the paid version of the script I suggested to do batch processing.

[Daliah]

I know this is a year 1/2 old, but I had a project with 9000 barcodes. I can use Bar Code pro to generate the codes, but then how to get them onto a sheet of 30 labels, or how to get them into anything to print them, without hand placing each ont.

I generated the list of 9000 numbers in Excel and used Data Merge in InDesign. I assigned a bar code font to the bar code part and arial (or whatever you want) to the human readable part. It worked beautifully. Well, there was 1 catch. I had to save this 300 page document to a PDF for the bar codes to work. I'm not sure how or why, but the Data Merge changed the font, and the PDF fixed it. Not a big deal or difficult at all to do, I'm just thankful I noticed and hope I remember to do that the next time I get this job. That's a lot of bar codes to mess up.

I hope this helps someone. I'm online looking for a reason Data Merge changes my bar code font.

[PattiD]

I work for Meadows Publishing Solutions and we have released an updated version of our 2D Bar Code Module for Adobe InDesign with a FREE license option for producing QR codes. This new software module is designed to generate QR Code, Data Matrix, and PDF417 two-dimensional bar codes directly in any Adobe InDesign document.

To help introduce the product, we are currently offering a FREE license of the module which is limited to the production of QR codes. The free license can be obtained by visiting http://www.meadowsps.com/2Dforfree

[shulse]

I am trying out the meadows publishing software for 14,000 tickets that need to be barcoded variably. I'll let you know how easy it is to use and how it turns out.