I’m a solo developer that built and maintains https://label.live https://label.live, a label design and print app (Electron) that has the ability to generate ba

I’m a solo developer that built and maintains https://label.live https://label.live, a label design and print app (Electron) that has the ability to generate barcodes thanks to the open source project BWIP-JS (and all the turtles beneath it). My app renders canvas data down to 1-bit images and sends them off to the printer as raster images. Each printer handles image data a bit differently. Although Zebra printers do support in-printer-barcodes (put a barcode of type Z at x,y) I opted to send full-sized images for every label and lose efficiency for greater reproducibility. I also support DYMO and BROTHER thermal printers that do not have built in barcode support. One of the things that people don’t think about (ie my loving users) is how a minimally sized barcode doubles in size due to DPI. If your barcode has narrow bars equaling one dot width, then your next choice larger is literally 2x the size. There is no gray in thermal printers, just black or white. And on the flip side, barcode scanners need the highest contrast to scan. Where people get in trouble is pixel misalignment, thinking that you can scale a tiny barcode by 20% at 200 DPI. Nope, sorry dear user! The last few years have been a ton of fun. I really enjoy HN posts about barcodes. It makes me feel relevant. Ha!