QR Code Tool

[Aurea Ratio]

Many thanks to @Bit Disappointed for the important points and feedback despite the blurred shouts from the crowd. It's never easy to deliver unpopular but necessary news! 

@serif Yes, I'm also a bit unsure about what possibilities this tool offers (when released), but for me, it will be important to be able to place an image in the middle of the QR code, like a logo or symbol, that gives the QR code a greater or more visible affiliation with a product or company, or where the symbol provides a better idea of the purpose of the QR code and makes the QR code appear more personal.

It gives the code a bit more design quality, but especially it ensures that users gain more trust in the code, and that it is the correct one, if it is surrounded by other information and graphics, for example on a poster or brochures, where there are multiple senders and advertisements, etc.

[Archangel]

Just a request. I want the QR code function to be able to produce something like this. Will it be possible?

 

[Hangman]

8 minutes ago, Archangel said:

Just a request. I want the QR code function to be able to produce something like this. Will it be possible?

It is, simply copy and paste your text into the QR Code field and it will create a matching QR Code...

Bare in mind the limitations of a QR Code, i.e., a QR code is capable of encoding a maximum of 2953 bytes of data, 4296 alphanumeric characters, 7089 numeric characters, or 1817 Kanji characters (character set according to JIS X 0208).

Here's one I made earlier...

[Hangman]

2 minutes ago, anto said:

And where does this code lead? A Google search query?

It does, as per @Archangel's example...

[pixelstuff]

6 hours ago, myclay said:

Feedback/Usability wise,
it would be nice to have an option to easily create a border with some text around the QR-Code.
Here is an example of such a result;
Of course the user could create such things manually but it is time consuming.

This seems a little bit redundant or niche for a program already designed to add these kinds of accents to objects. What if someone wants double lines, or triple lines, dashed lines, square corners, text on bottom, text on top and bottom, a different color, etc. 

[Hangman]

As mentioned earlier in this thread, the QR Code generator library has built-in support for 'Quiet Zone border modules' so the request was to include an option to specify a value for these when creating the QR Code and I can see no reason why this couldn't be extended to include a stroke, though of course one can easily be added once the QR Code is generated... as for adding text and logo's I guess that's down to whether or not the dev team build a front end UI to the QR Code tool to accommodate things like this...

[Aurea Ratio]

5 hours ago, Aurea Ratio said:

Many thanks to @Bit Disappointed for the important points and feedback despite the blurred shouts from the crowd. It's never easy to deliver unpopular but necessary news! 

@serif Yes, I'm also a bit unsure about what possibilities this tool offers (when released), but for me, it will be important to be able to place an image in the middle of the QR code, like a logo or symbol, that gives the QR code a greater or more visible affiliation with a product or company, or where the symbol provides a better idea of the purpose of the QR code and makes the QR code appear more personal.

It gives the code a bit more design quality, but especially it ensures that users gain more trust in the code, and that it is the correct one, if it is surrounded by other information and graphics, for example on a poster or brochures, where there are multiple senders and advertisements, etc.

Sigh, I see that the QR Code generator library does not support that.

[William Overington]

But Affinity Designer could be used to design some artwork with a white filled square within it so that the QR code could be pasted onto the white filled square.

For example, a picture of a butler holding up a silver tray and after the pasting is carried out the QR code looks like it is being presented on a silver tray by the butler.

William

 

[William Overington]

5 hours ago, Archangel said:

Just a request. I want the QR code function to be able to produce something like this. Will it be possible?

 

Do QR codes of that size and complexity and that thus present small chunks to the camera, decode without problems?

William,

 

[Archangel]

11 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Do QR codes of that size and complexity and that thus present small chunks to the camera, decode without problems?

William,

 

My Motorola phone decoded it very quickly. Unfortunately @Hangman version lost the spacing between stanzas.

[Hangman]

4 minutes ago, Archangel said:

My Motorola phone decoded it very quickly. Unfortunately @Hangman version lost the spacing between stanzas

Likely because I just copied and pasted the text after scanning your QR Code without any formatting…

[Archangel]

3 minutes ago, Hangman said:

Likely because I just copied and pasted the text after scanning your QR Code without any formatting…

Okay, Thanks for the information.

It's probably best to try it from an original document.

[Hangman]

3 hours ago, anto said:

@Hangman Did you create your code in Affiniti?

Hi @anto, no, I literally scanned @Archangel's QR Code, copied the text on my phone and pasted it directly into the QR Code tool in Affinity Designer. I wasn't concerned so much with the content but more with the statistics of the barcode as that was how I had interpreted the original question, i.e., QR Code version = 27, mask pattern = 2, character count = 1462, encoding mode = byte, error correction = level L, data bits = 11724.

[Gabe]

8 minutes ago, anto said:

This means that Affinity is not yet able to create codes with formatted text.

You can in 2415. While the payload field in the context toolbar does not accept soft/hard returns from a keyboard input (for now), you can either paste text with hard/soft returns in that field, or you can use the CMD/CTRL + click on canvas. That payload field does allow them  

[sebottino]

The QR code generator will save me a lot of time. No longer need outside programs to generate QR codes, no longer need to import them from other formats.

[Bit Disappointed]

On 4/28/2024 at 4:38 PM, Aurea Ratio said:

Many thanks to @Bit Disappointed for the important points and feedback despite the blurred shouts from the crowd. It's never easy to deliver unpopular but necessary news!

I am a fully grown man; my subconscious skips over the aforementioned persons' 'responses'.

Cheers!

[Peter Werner]

On 4/28/2024 at 12:56 PM, myclay said:

it would be nice to have an option to easily create a border with some text around the QR-Code.

I'd suggest creating the specific design with border and text that you would like to reuse over and over again as an asset in the Assets panel, with a dummy QR code inside. Then instead of adding a QR code with the tool from the toolbar, you would just drag your asset into your document and edit the placeholder QR code.

It wouldn't be slower to use than the QR code tool, but it would avoid complicating the tool with a hundred options for all the different border and text combinations people could possibly want to create.

But one thing that might be nice would be an integration with the text variables in Publisher so the target URL of a QR code could be placed somewhere as plain text in a way that it auto updates when the QR code is modified. This is a common use case to cater to peolpe who have trouble scanning a QR code for whatever reason. For example, a "Copy Target URL as Text Variable" context menu command that would then allow to paste it into any text object in the document.

[vonBusing]

On 4/28/2024 at 4:38 PM, Aurea Ratio said:

@serif Yes, I'm also a bit unsure about what possibilities this tool offers (when released), but for me, it will be important to be able to place an image in the middle of the QR code, like a logo or symbol, that gives the QR code a greater or more visible affiliation with a product or company, or where the symbol provides a better idea of the purpose of the QR code and makes the QR code appear more personal.

As far as I can see, you can already do that. A QR code comes with some level of redundancy and can work even if some parts are masked. Here I added a white circle with a diameter 30% of the QR code side and it still works as expected. Maybe, if control over the correction level is enabled, the available surface for a symbol could be optimized. (Ref @Hangman's post also covering this)

And, as @Peter Werner suggested, if this is a recurring need, it can be made reusable as an Asset.

[vonBusing]

On 4/29/2024 at 8:58 AM, Gabe said:

You can in 2415. While the payload field in the context toolbar does not accept soft/hard returns from a keyboard input (for now), you can either paste text with hard/soft returns in that field, or you can use the CMD/CTRL + click on canvas. That payload field does allow them  

Nice! multi-row VCARD data works nicely now.

[pixelstuff]

1 hour ago, vonBusing said:

As far as I can see, you can already do that. A QR code comes with some level of redundancy and can work even if some parts are masked. Here I added a white circle with a diameter 30% of the QR code side and it still works as expected. Maybe, if control over the correction level is enabled, the available surface for a symbol could be optimized. (Ref @Hangman's post also covering this)

 

The example you provided contained 26 characters out of the 47 character capacity in the version 2 QR code. What happens if you tried to nearly fill it up then cut out the circle?

[Aurea Ratio]

1 hour ago, vonBusing said:

As far as I can see, you can already do that. A QR code comes with some level of redundancy and can work even if some parts are masked. Here I added a white circle with a diameter 30% of the QR code side and it still works as expected. Maybe, if control over the correction level is enabled, the available surface for a symbol could be optimized. (Ref @Hangman's post also covering this)

And, as @Peter Werner suggested, if this is a recurring need, it can be made reusable as an Asset.

 

Thanks for the tip, but it's not something we can use. We don’t buy design software with QR functionality to have to resort to the level of hacks and workarounds as if it were open-source software. I can find QR functionality for free everywhere that does the same thing. Affinity is commercial graphic design software that should be able to do more than just implement someone else's work from GitHub and put a UI on it. I expect some level of Serif alleviating the burden on creative professionals, and I expect much more than an open-source frontend.

[CM0]

17 hours ago, Aurea Ratio said:

I can find QR functionality for free everywhere that does the same thing.

Agreed. It is a nice to have, but how does this basic implementation that's available everywhere already get prioritized over everything else that could have been done? Seems there are so many other areas requiring attention still neglected. For example, the spiral tool is still unfinished, being able to reverse the curve and use brushes properly would probably have been less effort to address. Also, still waiting for just one of my bugs submitted over many years to be fixed. Any one of those would have provided me greater productivity improvements.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "QR Code - shape does not update on payload change" (REF: AF-2767) has been fixed by the developers in internal build "2.5.0.2430".
This fix should soon be available as a customer beta and is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.

[lastingMadness]

Not going to lie, I've been hoping for this for awhile, but there's one thing I've noticed in testing. There is no way to incorporate data merge into the payload system. Is this something we should expect, or will payloads have to be entered in manually until otherwise stated?

[Hangman]

Hi @lastingMadness,

This has been raised already... and this was the feedback from Patrick...

On 4/20/2024 at 3:49 PM, Patrick Connor said:

Data Merge is not part of this feature, but we understand that it's likely to be a priority for implementing a way to achieve it