How can I create a barcode image in Java? I need something that will allow me to enter a number and produce the corresponding barcode image. Is there a free library available for this type of task?
iText is a great Java PDF library. They also have an API for creating barcodes. You don't need to be creating a PDF to use it.
This page has the details on creating barcodes. Here is an example from that site:
BarcodeEAN codeEAN = new BarcodeEAN();
codeEAN.setCodeType(codeEAN.EAN13);
codeEAN.setCode("9780201615883");
Image imageEAN = codeEAN.createImageWithBarcode(cb, null, null);
The biggest thing you will need to determine is what type of barcode you need. There are many different barcode formats and iText does support a lot of them. You will need to know what format you need before you can determine if this API will work for you.
There is also this free API that you can use to make free barcodes in java.
Barbecue
There is a free library called barcode4j
ZXing is a free open source Java library to read and generate barcode images. You need to get the source code and build the jars yourself. Here's a simple tutorial that I wrote for building with ZXing jars and writing your first program with ZXing.
[http://www.vineetmanohar.com/2010/09/java-barcode-api/]
I use
barbeque
, it's great, and supports a very wide range of different barcode formats.
See if you like
its API
.
Sample API:
public static Barcode createCode128(java.lang.String data)
throws BarcodeException
Creates a Code 128 barcode that
dynamically switches between character
sets to give the smallest possible
encoding. This will encode all
numeric characters, upper and lower
case alpha characters and control
characters from the standard ASCII
character set. The size of the barcode
created will be the smallest possible
for the given data, and use of this
"optimal" encoding will generally
give smaller barcodes than any of the
other 3 "vanilla" encodings.
Related
is there any easy way to create random emojis using java?
Did only find libraries which use a file as their data source.
There’s a full list of unicode-supported emoji here. As you scroll down this list, you’ll see why these libraries choose to rely on a data file instead of a set of generation rules.
Many emoji characters are represented by multiple code points, not all of which are even in the same code page, let alone the same length. To map a random number generator to the spectrum of emoji would be a very difficult (impossible?) task without a complete list of emoji.
I'm trying to create a Java program that will OCR many formats of images. Images cannot be read directly from file, because their bytes are to be send through network.
I'm currently able to read raw bytes of image pixels using ImageIO. However I would like to support all the formats that are supported by ImageMagick, so read the image using JMagick and then give raw bytes to Tess4J. I'm not sure how I should approach this. I found this function can give me bytes:
PixelPacket[] MagickImage.getColormap();
But I would have to write special method for transforming obtained the PixelPacket objects to consecutive bytes. I can do that, but maybe there's better way to do this? For example maybe there's some extremely raw file format (even more than http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format#mediaviewer/File:BMPfileFormat.png) that I could use for example in this method:
byte[] imageToBlob(ImageInfo imageInfo) ?
The imageInfo object will have to point to this raw format and then I can cut out the pixels information from the bytes array.
Is this the proper way or I should use something simpler (faster/more robust)?
Edit
I found the format I had in mind is called PNM.
I think using the dispatchImage method is what you are looking for, if using JMagick. It will give you access to the raw pixels of the image directly. No file format required.
See my MagickUtil class for examples, or just use that class if you feel like.
I've also written pure Java ImageIO plugins for many of the same formats that JMagick supports, that might be of use. You'll find them in the my GitHub repository.
I have created a program that should one day become a PDF editor
It's purpose will be saving GUI's textual content to the PDF, and loading it from it. GUI resembles text editor, but it only has certain fields(JTextAreas, actually).
It can look like this (this is only one page, it can have many more, also upper and lower margins are cut out of the picture) It should actually resemble A4 in pixel size.
I have looked around for a bit for PDF libraries and found out that iText could suit my PDF creating needs, however, if I understood it correct, it retirevs text from a whole page as a string which won't work for me, because I will need to detect diferent fields/paragaphs/orsomething to be able to load them back into the program.
Now, I'm a bit lazy, but I don't want to spend hours going trough numerus PDF libraries just to find out that they won't work for me.
Instead, I'm asking someone with a bit more Java PDF handling experience to recommend me one according to my needs.
Or maybe recommend me how to add invisible parts to PDF which will help my program to determine where is it exactly situated insied a PDF file...
Just to be clear (I formed my question wrong before), only thing I need to put in my PDF is text, and that's all I need to later be able to get out. My program should be able to read PDF's which he created himself...
Also, because of the designated use of files created with this program, they need to be in the PDF format.
Short Answer: Use an intermediate format like JSON or XML.
Long Answer: You're using PDF's in a manner that they wasn't designed for. PDF's were not designed to store data; they were designed to present and format data in an portable form. Furthermore, a PDF is a very "heavy" way to store data. I suggest storing your data in another manner, perhaps in a format like JSON or XML.
The advantage now is that you are not tied to a specific output-format like PDF. This can come in handy later on if you decide that you want to export your data into another format (like a Word document, or an image) because you now have a common representation.
I found this link and another link that provides examples that show you how to store and read back metadata in your PDF. This might be what you're looking for, but again, I don't recommend it.
If you really insist on using PDF to store data, I suggest that you store the actual data in either XML or RDF and then attach that to the PDF file when you generate it. Then you can read the XML back for the data.
Assuming that your application will only consume PDF files generated by the same application, there is one part of the PDF specification called Marked Content, that was introduced precisely for this purpose. Using Marked Content you can specify the structure of the text in your document (chapter, paragraph, etc).
Read Chapter 14 - Document Interchange of the PDF Reference Document for more details.
first I'd like to explain the situation/requirements that lead to the question:
In our web application we can't support CMYK images (JPEG) since IE 8 and below can't display them.
Thus we need to detect when someone wants to upload such an image and deny it.
Unfortunately, Java's ImageIO won't read those images or would not enable me to get the detected color space. From debugging it seems like JPEGImageReader internally gets the color space code 11 (which would mean JCS_YCCK) but I can't safely access that information.
When querying the reader for the image types I get nothing for CMYK, so I might assume no image types = unsupported image.
I converted the source CMYK image to RGB using an imaging tool in order to test whether it would then be readable (I tried to simulate the admin's steps when getting the message "No CMYK supported"). However, JPEGImageReader would not read that image, since it assumes (comment in the source!)3-component RGB color space but the image header reports 4 components (maybe RGBA or ARGB) and thus an IllegalArgumentException is thrown.
Thus, ImageIO is not an option since I can't reliably get the color space of an image and I can't tell the admin why an otherwise fine image (it can be displayed by the browser) would not be accepted due to some internal error.
This led me to try JAI ImageIO whose CLibJPEGImageReader does an excellent job and correctly reads all my test images.
However, since we're deploying our application in a JBoss that might host other applications as well, we'd like to keep them as isolated as possible. AFAIK, I'd need to install JAI ImageIO to the JRE or otherwise make the native libs available in order to use them, and thus other applications might get access to them as well, which might cause side effects (at least we'd have to test a lot to ensure that's not the case).
That's the explanation for the question, and here it comes again:
Is there any pure Java alternative to JAI ImageIO which reliably detects and possibly converts CMYK images?
Thanks in advance,
Thomas
I found a solution that is ok for our needs: Apache Commons Sanselan. This library reads JPEG headers quite fast and accurate (at least all my test images) as well as a number of other image formats.
The downside is that it won't read JPEG image data, but I can do that with the basic JRE tools.
Reading JPEG images for conversion is quite easy (the ones that ImageIO refuses to read, too):
JPEGImageDecoder decoder = JPEGCodec.createJPEGDecoder(new FileInputStream( new File(pFilename) ) );
BufferedImage sourceImg = decoder.decodeAsBufferedImage();
Then if Sanselan tells me the image is actually CMYK, I get the source image's raster and convert myself:
for( /*each pixel in the raster, which is represented as int[4]*/ )
{
double k = pixel[3] / 255.0;
double r = (255.0 - pixel[0])*k;
double g = (255.0 - pixel[1])*k;
double b = (255.0 - pixel[2])*k;
}
This give quite good results in the RGB images not being too bright or dark. However, I'm not sure why multiplying with k prevents the brightening. The JPEG is actually decoded in native code and the CMYK->RGB conversion I got states something different, I just tried the multiply to see the visual result.
If anybody could shed some light on this, I'd be grateful.
I've posted a pure Java solution for reading all sorts of JPEG images and converting them to RGB.
It's built on the following facts:
While ImageIO cannot read JPEG images with CMYK as a buffered image, it can read the raw pixel data (raster).
Sanselan (or Apache Commons Imaging as it's called now) can be used to read the details of CMYK images.
There are images with inverted CMYK values (an old Photoshop bug).
There are images with YCCK instead of CMYK (can easily be converted).
Beware of another post as the Java 7 does not allow to use directly Sun's implementation without special parameters as indicated in import com.sun.image.codec.jpeg.*.
In our web application we can't support CMYK images (JPEG) since
IE 8 and below can't display them. Thus we need to detect when someone
wants to upload such an image and deny it.
I don't agree with your "Thus we need to detect when someone wants to upload such an image and deny it". A much more user-friendly policy would be to convert it to something else than CMYK.
The rest of your post is a bit confusing in that regards seen that you ask both for detection and conversion, which are two different things. Once again, I think converting the image is much more user-friendly.
No need to write in bold btw:
Is there any pure Java alternative to JAI ImageIO which reliably
detects and possibly converts CMYK images?
Pure Java I don't know, but ImageMagick works fine to convert CMYK image to RGB ones. Calling ImageMagick on the server-side from Java really isn't complicated. I used to do it manually by calling an external process but nowadays there are wrappers like JMagick and im4java.
In a current project i need to display PDFs in a webpage. Right now we are embedding them with the Adobe PDF Reader but i would rather have something more elegant (the reader does not integrate well, it can not be overlaid with transparent regions, ...).
I envision something close google documents, where they display PDFs as image but also allow text to be selected and copied out of the PDF (an requirement we have).
Does anybody know how they do this? Or of any library we could use to obtain a comparable result?
I know we could split the PDFs into images on server side, but this would not allow for the selection of text ...
Thanks in advance for any help
PS: Java based project, using wicket.
I have some suggestions, but it'll be definitely hard to implement this stuff. Good luck!
First approach:
First, use a library like pdf-renderer (https://pdf-renderer.dev.java.net/) to convert the PDF into an image. Store these images on your server or use a caching-technique. Converting PDF into an image is not hard.
Then, use the Type Select JavaScript library (http://www.typeselect.org/) to overlay textual data over your text. This text is selectable, while the real text is still in the original image. To get the original text, see the next approach, or do it yourself, see the conclusion.
The original text then must be overlaid on the image, which is a pain.
Second approach:
The PDF specifications allow textual information to be linked to a Font. Most documents use a subset of Type-3 or Type-1 fonts which (often) use a standard character set (I thought it was Unicode, but not sure). If your PDF document does not contain a standard character set, (i.e. it has defined it's own) it's impossible to know what characters are which glyphs (symbols) and thus are you unable to convert to a textual representation.
Read the PDF document, read the graphics-objects, parse the instructions (use the PDF specification for more insight in this process) for rendering text, converting them to HTML. The HTML conversion can select appropriate tags (like <H1> and <p>, but also <b> and <i>) based on the parameters of the fonts (their names and attributes) used and the instructions (letter spacing, line spacing, size, face) in the graphics-objects.
You can use the pdf-renderer library for reading and parsing the PDF files and then code a HTML translator yourself. This is not easy, and it does not cover all cases of PDF documents.
In this approach you will lose the original look of the document. There are some PDF generation libraries which do not use the Adobe Font techniques. This also is a problem with the first approach, even you can see it you can not select it (but equal behavior with the official Adobe Reader, thus not a big deal you'd might say).
Conclusion:
You can choose the first approach, the second approach or both.
I wouldn't go in the direction of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) since it's really overkill in such a problem, since it also has several drawbacks. This approach is Google using. If there are characters which are unrecognized, a human being does the processing.
If you are into the human-processing thing; you can only use the Type Select library and PDF to Image conversion and do the OCR yourself, which is probably the easiest (human as a machine = intelligently cheap, lol) way to solve the problem.