In the final days of march Graham van de Ruit asked for a ISBN barcode generator in the Scriptographer forum. As it happend, I had, for some time, been reading about this very subject with the intent of making one but never gotten around to do it.

Now, with the apparent “high” demand I quickly hopped to it and threw together a very crude EAN-13 (which is actually the same as ISBN) barcode generator and posted it in his forum post under the name of ‘BarTender.js’ as I didn’t think it could warrant a real script release.

Roughly two and a half months passed until Graham posted a reply and with it a modified version of my script, where the biggest change was making the text look a lot nicer, and he appropriatly re-named the script ‘BarMaid.js’. Nice touch.

While my original intention was to make a full-fledged barcode generator with support of different kinds of symbologies I knew I had to re-write the code completely. But, as scripting isn’t something that comes very natural to me, I am really struggling to come to terms with a lot of stuff. Though the progress is slow; thankfully, the journey is a pretty steady and enjoyable one.
As of now I have managed to re-write the EAN-13 routine, making it a bit more effective, and I have also added support for the Code 39 symbology, which is pictured at the top. More to come…