Barcode Producer beats Illustrator plug-ins by a margin

Many designers use Adobe Illustrator to design not only digital art but also brochures, posters and billboards. With barcodes everywhere, they need to integrate them with their design. A number of plug-ins exist that allow you to create barcodes right from within Illustrator. This integration feature is often seen as a huge benefit, but a stand-alone app like Barcode Producer may actually be more cost-effective and better at creating ISO-compliant, high-quality barcodes.

Many Illustrator barcode plug-ins are subscription-based. Some cost in excess of $140 for a yearly subscription while others come with a relatively cheap lifetime license and few capabilities. In contrast, Barcode Producer uses a permanent license, comes with features that enforce ISO-compliance while still offering a lot of flexibility.

Illustrator barcode plug-ins can only be used with Illustrator while Barcode Producer is a stand-alone application that sends your barcode to Illustrator with a single click and has single-click-send support to InDesign, Photoshop and Preview as well, and it enables you to save it to an EPS, PDF or TIFF file that you can use in any other app that imports one of those image file formats. Barcode Producer also prints your barcode directly to a printer and has a built-in basic barcode testing feature, an ISBN check digit calculator and more.

What all this means is that Barcode Producer is more cost-effective than any Illustrator plug-in. Perhaps even more importantly, due to its Finishing, Color and Advanced options, Bar Width Adjustment functionality and output device resolution settings you will be guaranteed of ISO compliant and high quality barcodes.

A fine example of how Barcode Producer beats plug-ins is a real-world example of a designer who wants to insert a range of ITF-14 barcodes at a 25% scale. One of the most expensive plug-ins available had an issue with the human-readable characters overlapping.

With Barcode Producer, creating such barcodes involves setting the Factor option to 25% — the human-readable part is automatically reduced with no overlapping at all. Tweaking Barcode Producer’s result even further can be done in the Advanced panel so the barcode can become narrower or larger, all within the latest ITF-14 specs.