For a project I am working on right now, I needed to generate barcodes and QR codes. Looking around for solutions for the barcodes I quickly found Zend_Barcode (thanks to someone pointing me to it, by the way. I had not expected a barcode generator in Zend). For QR, it was slightly harder to find a good solution. A quick question on Twitter helped a lot. In the end, it boiled down to two options: PHP QR Code and using the Google Chart API.

His examples are Symfony-based, but it's easy to translate them over to the framework (or just basic script) of your choice. Zend_Barcode had what he needed for normal barcodes, but when it came to the QR side, he opted for the home-brew solution rather than the Google alternative (for reasons related to the project). Using the library is as simple as defining the image output type and the string you want to encode.

Brought into the mainstream by supermarket checkout systems, bar codes have become a ubiquitous element in our daily lives. Rarely will one come across any product that doesn't have a barcode. The idea of a barcode originated in 1932 from the thesis of Wallace Flint at Harvard.

He touches on a two types of barcodes - standard UPC and the matrix codes (like ShotCode and Semacode) - before looking at how you can create them with the PEAR Image_Barcode package. It supports multiple code types including Code 39, EAN 13, INT 25 and PostNet. Output examples are included.

I was more interested in Semacode, because it looks somehow cooler than QR in my opinion. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any free (beer and speech) PHP library to create these codes.

He did, however, find a Javascript port (from a C library) to harvest the logic from and create his own PHP class to handle the semacode creation. He notes that it's probably still a bit buggy but is offering it for download to whoever might want to mess around with it.