[barcode] Telepen codes.

[Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng]

Sorry for the slow response, things have been a bit "hairy"...

On Sat, 9 Oct 2004, Alessandro Rubini wrote:

>
> Hello.
>
>> May I suggest support for the telepen code as used by UK academic
         [...]
>> http://www.telepen-barcode.co.uk/images/downloads/BarcodeSymbology.pdf
>
> I'm getting it now, hoping to have some time for barcode soon.
>
>> I think that I can't contribute to this because I have seen perl
>> code that implements it, and it is not GPL code, so it would not be
>> black box development.
>
> Usually it's not a matter of being completely unaware of other code.
> Unless you singed your mindshare away (like some vendors require before
> showing the code).  If that code was only under a copyright license (no
> contract explicitly signed by you or your employer, I mean), then you
> can reimplement things yourself, as long as they are not copied.
> Given the framework of GNU barcode (the intermediate encoding and so on)
> I doubt that your port would be a plain copy.

I have to admit that though I have got this to work in Ruby
(essentially by copying as the languages have much in common), I don't
really understand why it works, but I found the telepen spec rather
confusing with its not needing a 10 bit pair (or whatever it was).
I understood the other combinations could code for it, but it seemed
to overcomplicate any state machine...
>
>>  Is that a misunderstanding?  If it is, I can
>> point to where this perl was found, if that helps.
>
> Yes that would be interesting. Thanks

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/telepen.pl

is the URL I found for this.  I did try to contact the author, sent
a small patch for the code, as well as my Ruby code, but he's
obviously very busy too, as I heard nothing.

It produces a pbm image -- i.e. one that is an all ASCII text format.

> /alessandro
>

         Thank you
         Hugh