Barcode Producer: less expensive, better than an InDesign plug-in

Adobe InDesign is the number one layout design application used by many people to design everything from brochures to books. Often, those kinds of design need a barcode added somewhere on the page. To create these, a number of options ranging from barcode fonts to plug-ins are available, with Barcode Producer being the best choice.

Let’s first take a look at plug-ins. Most, if not all, InDesign barcode generator plug-ins are subscription-based. Some cost in excess of $140 for a yearly subscription. In contrast, Barcode Producer uses a permanent license, which is $399 for the app and an additional $299 for the Automator batch creation module.

InDesign barcode plug-ins can only be used with InDesign. Barcode Producer is a stand-alone application that sends your barcode to InDesign… and to Illustrator and to Photoshop and to Apple’s Preview app, as well as saving 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.

In short, Barcode Producer is far more cost-effective than any InDesign plug-in. And with its Finishing, Color and Advanced options, its module or Bar Width Adjustment functionality, and output device resolution settings, it’s better at creating ISO compliant high-quality barcodes than some plug-ins that treat barcodes like patterns and of which the level of compliance is unclear.

But wait, there’s more. You could use a ‘barcode font’. You could indeed, but although barcode fonts can be used in a great variety of applications, the actual process of creating the barcode can be very challenging.

Things get tricky when using fonts for barcodes like Code 128, Interleaved 2 of 5 and others, as the data encoding requirements can be quite complex. For example, the encoding might need to be converted to a string of characters that does not even come close to the human-readable data.

Barcode Producer saves you from those complications and, as a stand-alone app, can be used in just as many applications with an even higher control over the output quality.