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Changing barcode colors


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I think this should be easy, but I'd love some advice from people who have done this as it would be a disaster to publish this and find it is wrong.

 

Basically I have received the barcode in several formats bmp, eps, jpg, pdf and tif

 

So my first question is what format to edit? The EPS looks awful i Photo, the PDF has embedded fonts that can't be found.

 

Then, what is the process for adjusting the black to another colur (I want a dark green)

 

Thanks.

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Hi Mr Lucky,

I would pick the PDF or EPS (why does it look awful?) assuming the barcode is in vector format.

Affinity apps don't support embedded fonts. You have to install the font on your system to be able to edit them.

If the code (objects) are in vector format you only have to select them and change their fill colour to green.

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Just set the dpi of your document to be higher than the current (72dpi?). The vector formats you've mentioned make the assumption that the 'world' is 72dpi, but that you can insert image data of any dpi. Your document appears to be vector so there are no images and as such the document is guessing it is meant to be at 72dpi - which hasn't got enough resolution for your purposes, it seems.

 

Edited to add: To change the colour of the items in your document, just select the contents of that 'layer' you can see in the Layers panel and change the colour to the dark green you're after :)

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You are correct it does seem to be 72dpi. However changing that to 300 (without resample) makes no difference.

 

However if I click on Edit in Designer (while at 72) it looks fine. But if I change to 300 in Designer it becomes a lot smaller

 

If I change to 300 in photo, then open in Designer it is fine at 300

 

I'm now a bit confused.

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Photo is setting the dpi to a number and not changing the number of pixels if you do not have 'Resample' checked. Photo's display is showing you the pixels (which have remained unchanged). Designer shows you vector data, so there are no 'pixels' to see so it looks right. In Photo you need to make sure you use Document->Resize Document... and make sure Resample is checked (you should see there will be more pixels as a result) :)

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There are some rules how barcode must be made it to be machine readable. Preferably it should be vector or 1-bit bitmap graphic. Colours can be used but only as solid as halftoning messes up machine reading, contrast should be high. Scaling may be unadvisable. Etc. Certainly soft greyscale barcode may be worthless. If in doubt your printing house can probably make a working one for you, possibly add one in final PDF or test your file.

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There are some rules how barcode must be made it to be machine readable. Preferably it should be vector or 1-bit bitmap graphic. Colours can be used but only as solid as halftoning messes up machine reading, contrast should be high. Scaling may be unadvisable. Etc. Certainly soft greyscale barcode may be worthless. If in doubt your printing house can probably make a working one for you, possibly add one in final PDF or test your file.

 

Thanks, yes I have seen various sites with barcode rules. They give sizes and placement, which I have done correctly and I know there must be contrast but i can't find anything where actual colors are mentioned. I will ask the printer. My green color is CMYK 70 33 100 40 against white so i think it should be OK. I've seen a lot worse on milk cartons.

 

Maybe there is an online barcode test, I'll look into that.

 

Hmmm, PNG-24 preset export is very low quality ????

 

post-36684-0-99645300-1474561935_thumb.png

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