3. Using Zint Barcode Studio

Zint Barcode Studio is the graphical user interface for Zint. If you are starting from a command line interface you can start the GUI by typing

zint-qt

or on Windows

qtZint.exe

See the note in section 2.3 Microsoft Windows about Microsoft Defender SmartScreen.

Below is a brief guide to Zint Barcode Studio.

3.1 Main Window and Data Tab

This is the main window of Zint Barcode Studio. The top of the window shows a preview of the barcode that the current settings would create. These settings can be changed using the controls below. The text box in the "Data to Encode" groupbox on this first Data tab allows you to enter the data to be encoded. When you are happy with your settings you can use the "Save..." button to save the resulting image to a file.

The "Symbology" drop-down box gives access to all of the symbologies supported by Zint shown in alphabetical order. The text box to its right can filter the drop-down to only show matching symbologies. For instance typing "mail" will only show barcodes in the drop-down whose names contain the word "mail". Each word entered will match. So typing "mail post" will show barcodes whose names contain "mail" or "post" (or both).

The ellipsis button "..." to the right of the data text box invokes the Data Dialog - see 3.7 Data Dialog for details. The delete button next to it will clear the data text box and the ECI (Extended Channel Interpretations) drop-down if set.

To set the barcode as a Programming Initialisation symbol click the "Reader Init" checkbox. The "1234.." button to its right invokes the Sequence Dialog - see 3.8 Sequence Dialog. The zap button will clear all data and reset all settings for the barcode to defaults.

The "BMP" and "SVG" buttons at the bottom will copy the image to the clipboard in BMP format and SVG format respectively. Further copy-to-clipboard formats are available by clicking the "Menu" button, along with "CLI Equivalent...", "Save As...", "Factory Reset...", "Help (online)", "About..." and "Quit" options. Most of the options are also available in a context menu by right-clicking the preview.

3.2 GS1 Composite Groupbox

In the middle of the Data tab is an area for creating composite symbologies which appears when the currently selected symbology supports the GS1 Composite symbology standard - namely EAN-13, EAN-8, GS1-128, GS1 DataBar (all variants), UPC-A and UPC-E. See 6.3 GS1 Composite Symbols (ISO 24723) for details.

If the "Add 2D Component" checkbox is checked, GS1 data can then be entered in the "2D Component Data" text box, with square brackets used to separate Application Identifier (AI) information from data as shown here, or using one of the other formats described in 4.11.3 GS1 Data Entry and Options, where the GS1 checkbox options "()" (Parentheses), "Raw", "No Check" and "Strict" are also discussed.

3.3 Additional ECI/Data Segments Groupbox

For symbologies that support ECIs (Extended Channel Interpretations) the middle of the Data tab is an area for entering additional data segments with their own ECIs. Up to 4 segments (including the main "Data to Encode" as segment 0) may be specified. See 4.16 Multiple Segments for details.

3.4 Symbology-specific Groupbox

Many symbologies have extra options to change the content, format and appearance of the symbol generated. For those with few additional options (and no support for GS1 data or ECIs), the middle of the Data tab is an area for setting those options.

Here is shown the check digit options for an Interleaved Code 2 of 5 symbol (see 6.1.2.4 Interleaved Code 2 of 5 (ISO 16390)).

Symbologies with more than a few options (or support for GS1 data or ECIs) have a second Symbology-specific tab, shown next.

3.5 Symbology-specific Tab

A second tab appears for those symbologies with more than a few extra options.

Here is shown the options available for an Aztec Code symbol.

You can adjust its size or error correction level (see 6.6.8 Aztec Code (ISO 24778)), select how its data is to be treated (see 4.11 Input Modes), and set it as part of a Structured Append sequence of symbols (see 4.17 Structured Append).

3.6 Appearance Tab

The Appearance tab can be used to adjust the dimensions and other properties of the symbol.

The "Height" value affects the height of symbologies which do not have a fixed width-to-height ratio, i.e. those other than matrix symbologies. For such symbologies the "Automatic Height" checkbox will be enabled - uncheck this to manually adjust the height. The "Compliant Height" checkbox applies to symbologies that define a standard height - see 4.4 Adjusting Height.

Boundary bars can be added with the "Border Type" drop-down and their size adjusted with "Border Width", and whitespace can be adjusted both horizontally (first spinbox) and vertically (second spinbox), and also through the "Quiet Zones" checkbox if standard quiet zones are defined for the symbology.

The size of the saved image can be specified with "Printing Scale", and also by clicking the icon to invoke the Set Printing Scale Dialog - see 4.9 Adjusting Image Size (X-dimension) for further details.

The foreground and background colours can be set either using the text boxes which accept "RRGGBBAA" hexadecimal values and "C,M,Y,K" decimal percentage values, or by clicking the foreground eye and background eye buttons which invoke a colour picker.

(Note that to change the colours visually, the luminance slider, the long narrow column on the right, must be adjusted.) The color picker only deals in RGB(A), and will overwrite any CMYK values with RGB(A) values once "OK" is selected.

Referring back to Figure 7: Appearance Tab, the colours can be reset to black-on-white using the "Reset" button, and exchanged one for the other using the swap button next to it.

3.7 Data Dialog

Clicking on the ellipsis "..." button next to the "Data to Encode" text box in the Data tab opens a larger window which can be used to enter longer strings of text. You can also use this window to load data from a file.

The dialog is also available for additional ECI/Data segments (Figure 4: Encoding multiple segments) by clicking the ellipsis button to the right of their data text boxes.

Note that if your data contains line feeds (LF) then the data will be split into separate lines in the dialog box. On saving the data back to the main text box any separate lines in the data will be escaped as '\n' and the "Parse Escapes" checkbox will be set. This only affects line feeds, not carriage returns (CR) or CR+LF pairs, and behaves the same on both Windows and Unix. (For details on escape sequences, see 4.1 Inputting Data.)

3.8 Sequence Dialog

Clicking on the sequence button (labelled "1234..") in the Data tab opens the Sequence Dialog. This allows you to create multiple barcode images by entering a sequence of data inputs in the right hand panel. Sequences can also be automatically generated by entering parameters on the left hand side or by importing the data from a file. Zint will generate a separate barcode image for each line of text in the right hand panel. The format field determines the format of the automatically generated sequence where characters have the meanings as given below:

Once you’re happy with the Sequence Data, click the "Export..." button to bring up the Export Dialog, discussed next.

3.9 Export Dialog

The Export Dialog invoked by pressing the "Export..." button in the Sequence Dialog sets the parameters for exporting the sequence of barcode images. Here you can set the output directory, the format of the output filenames and what their image type will be. Note that the symbology, colour and other formatting information are taken from the main window.

3.10 CLI Equivalent Dialog

The CLI Equivalent Dialog can be invoked from the main menu or the context menu (Figure 2: Main menu (left) and context menu (right)) and displays the CLI command that will reproduce the barcode as currently configured in the GUI. Press the "Copy" button to copy the command to the clipboard, which can then be pasted into the command line.