Gui Development

Hi,

I have been developing a C library for encoding barcode standards on Linux using the SUSE platform for well over a year now and making steady progress. The project is, of course, open source and issued under the GPL.

My personal opinion is that making these standards available to Linux and, even better, to SUSE in a free way will be good (if modest) step towards attracting industry/manufacturing customers to our favorite platform.

I have spent the last couple of weeks trying to understand Qt and C++ to give the project a GUI and, to be frank, I'm in over my head. Part of the problem is that I just don't have the time to dedicate to the project that it really needs. So...

I know this is a heck of a cheek but I'm looking for someone who can help out with the project, preferably somebody who is familiar with GUI development. I suspect that for anybody familiar with the technology making a GUI front end for my library wouldn't take very long. If this is you then please, please contact me! If there is nobody available on this list then please could somebody let me know where else I could try? I would be very grateful for any assistance.

The project code is available from:http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/zint

The latest manual which shows the capabilities of the package at present is available at:http://www.zint.org.uk

Thank you,

Hooper.

Hi,

I have been developing a C library for encoding barcode standards on Linux using the SUSE platform for well over a year now and making steady progress. The project is, of course, open source and issued under the GPL.

My personal opinion is that making these standards available to Linux and, even better, to SUSE in a free way will be good (if modest) step towards attracting industry/manufacturing customers to our favorite platform.

I have spent the last couple of weeks trying to understand Qt and C++ to give the project a GUI and, to be frank, I'm in over my head. Part of the problem is that I just don't have the time to dedicate to the project that it really needs. So...

I know this is a heck of a cheek but I'm looking for someone who can help out with the project, preferably somebody who is familiar with GUI development. I suspect that for anybody familiar with the technology making a GUI front end for my library wouldn't take very long. If this is you then please, please contact me! If there is nobody available on this list then please could somebody let me know where else I could try? I would be very grateful for any assistance.

The project code is available from:http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/zint

The latest manual which shows the capabilities of the package at present is available at:http://www.zint.org.uk

Thank you,

Hooper.
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Could you please tell me how your application is working
My questions ...

1) Is your application drawing/editor kind of thing ..?
2) Is it doing complex calculation ...?
3) Can you explain how the user will interact with you appliaction ...?
4) Do you want to run your application both in windows and linux ...?
5) How long do you expect to finish the GUI work ...?


please give me the details ...?

Okay, fair enough...

1) Is your application drawing/editor kind of thing ..?
The library encodes data into an optical symbol (a barcode). The output from the encoding process is currently either a EPS file or a PNG image. The GUI would only require a (large) text box for data input, and the ability to set the encoding method and other options which will change depending on which encoding method is chosen.

2) Is it doing complex calculation ...?
The library is doing complex calculations including Reed-Solomon error correction, lots of bitwise manipulations and working with some very large numbers. This is all contained within the library, however, and no calculations would be required of the GUI.

3) Can you explain how the user will interact with you appliaction ...?
I'm open to suggestion but my current idea is that the user will set up all the options, enter the data they want to encode and press 'Go!' or something to that effect. It would be nice to have some method of copy-and-paste or drag-and-drop to allow the user to place the resulting symbol into office documents but I don't know if this is practical or even possible.

4) Do you want to run your application both in windows and linux ...?
Yes, I would like to have a Windows port - I have already had people asking me for this. MacOS too! However I'm primarily interested in the Linux user.

5) How long do you expect to finish the GUI work ...?
I really have no idea. I'm not working to any deadlines. I anticipate the GUI would need updating from time to time as I develop the library further, but not doing anything more complex than already described.

So, to sum up, the GUI would need to collect together the user's options and the data, feed this into the C library API using the methods described in the libzint documentation and (if possible) display the output. If anything extra needs to be built into the library to accommodate the GUI this can be done - nothing is set in stone.

I hope this clears up the situation. Thank you for your interest.

Hooper.

Hello, Hooper.

You've developed a pretty library, and nicely documented, as well. Congrats.

I'm trying to develop a basic wxGTK GUI frontend in C++ for zint (I don't now if you are still interested, but i'm not an experienced programmer, so this is a learning exercise for me, rather than a serious interface). The advantage for using wxWidgets is that it's cross platform, so if a port to Windows (or Mac OS) of zint libraries is done, then the GUI could be instantly ported as well (also using Code:Blocks IDE and wxFormBuilder GUI builder, which are open source cross platform tools, as well).

In any case, I would comment you a problem I've encountered compiling your library.

I've downloaded, compiled and happily installed the qrencoding library (v2.0.0) and their related headers and utilities. But when compiling (make) zint, I get always an error:

qr.c: In function ‘encode’:
qr.c:43: warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast
qr.c:45: error: too few arguments to function ‘QRcode_encodeString’
make: *** [libzint] Error 1

so I'm forced to use the 'libzint_noqr' parameter. Then, all goes fine and the library is built. But... How could I try to avoid the commented error and build your library with qreconding support? In the declaration for QRcode_encodeString in v.2.0.0 (24/01/2008), the qrenconde version I've installed, there are five parameters:

QRcode *QRcode_encodeString(const char *string, int version, QRecLevel level, QRencodeMode hint, int casesensitive)

And you're calling this function using only four. So I added the last parameter modifying line 45 in qr.c as follows:

********code = QRcode_encodeString(intext, version, level, hint, casesensitive);

Is this correct?

On the other hand, I'm wondering about the function used in line 43. You've specified there 'QRcode_encodeStringCase', which is generating a warning during compilation. Shouldn't it be 'QRcode_encodeString8bit'?

Doing those two little modifications, I've been able to compile the library (supposedly with qrencode support) and run the all the tests (generating the demo images) without problems.

Regards.

Hi,

Thanks for having a look at my code.

Your fixes are absolutely spot on - thanks for drawing my attention to this. I will get this amended for the next release of libzint. I'm hoping to add better user control over QR Code encoding at the same time.

libzint's QR Code support was added when libqrencode version 1.0.2 was the latest version available and until you mentioned it I hadn't realised that I haven't updated my libqrencode library since then.

I'm very interested in any progress you make in putting together a GUI for Zint and very grateful to you for even giving it a try. I don't consider myself to be an experienced programmer either: Zint is the first program I have ever written which requires more than one source code file! I'm learning as I go...

Thanks again,

Hooper.

Hello, again.

Nice to see an updated download (version 1.6) with some outdated files being removed (pngold.c and so) and other updates Now, it compiles fine in my box with the default options, except for a warning message ([tt]In file included from png.c:32: maxipng.h:584: warning: initializer-string for array of chars is too long[/tt]), but not a problem, at all.

I'll inform you in short about my progress.

Regards.

PS/ btw, what was the purpose for the previous (now removed) hextest.sh script?

Hi,

I knew about that warning, thanks, but it's a minor problem which doesn't seem to affect the program in any way. I will fix it for the next version (it won't take much doing) but I don't think it will cause any problems in the meantime. I thought it more important in the short term to get an up-to-date version of qr.c uploaded.

Hextest.sh (and the accompanying code in ps.c, now removed) was a method of testing the code without actually making output files. It produced a hex dump of the encoded symbol and outputted it to stdout. When I was altering ps.c and png.c to cope with RSS and composte symbology the code started doing strange things so I found this quite useful. Now they're sorted out this code isn't needed.

pngold.c was a mistake! I meant to delete it before releasing the last version but when I came to tar it up I forgot it was there! No doubt there are other little gremlins hidden in there somewhere but I haven't found any yet.

Thanks for your feedback,

Hooper.