Blitz Tools is well-known for its barcode software. Barcode Generator is hard to beat in terms of powerful features and ease-of-use. One of their latest barcode utilities is Barcode Plugin for Illustrator. If you want to have a tool that is readily available from the toolbar and that creates vector-based barcodes in almost every format, quickly and easily, Barcode Plugin is one of the best choices.

Barcode Plugin for Illustrator is visible in Illustrator’s interface as an extra button in the Illustrator Toolbar. Clicking on the Barcode button opens a dialogue window where you can set the readable code for a large number of 1D and 2D codes, including EAN, ISBN, Data Matrix and PDF417. When you click the OK button, the barcode is created as a grouped object on the page.

Every barcode can be changed in appearance right inside Illustrator, although when you do, the barcode obviously is no longer valid and its content can’t be validated by the plug-in anymore. The Barcode Plugin manual warns against this, and rightly so.

Drawing Barcodes

Barcode Plugin isn’t the only Illustrator plug-in for barcode drawing that has been released over the past couple of years. There have been others and they all shared the same approach: a barcode tool in the Toolbar and the barcode created on the page as a grouped object.

However, the ones I have reviewed previously were difficult to use and had a complicated interface. They also were limited to 1D barcodes --the striped barcodes that we all know from the supermarket and from the ISBN codes on our books.

Barcode Plugin differs from competing products in a number of areas. First of all, it also supports the 2D barcodes that are often much more difficult to generate. PDF417 is relatively easy to come by, but Data Matrix and Quick Response (QR) Code are more exotic because they’re more or less proprietary codes.

Although initially invented by and used for tracking parts in (Japanese) vehicle manufacturing, QR Codes are now used in a much broader context spanning both commercial tracking applications as well as convenience-oriented applications aimed at mobile phone users.

Ease-of-use

QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that a user might need information about. A user having a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL.

The new ISBN book code with 13 positions is included as well, as are EAN 13 and Code 128 GS1. The GS1-128 standard is an application standard within the Code 128 barcode. It identifies data with Application Identifiers (AI). January 1, 2007 was the date after which all barcodes on books will accommodate 13-digit ISBN numbers. These “new” ISBN-13 barcodes are visually the same as the older style Bookland barcodes. Both are EAN-13 barcodes with a 5-digit supplemental code. ISBN-13 barcodes are GTIN-compliant (Global Trade Identification Number).

The second area where Barcode Plugin differs from its competitors is in the ease-of-use. The dialogue window is intuitive and basically has all the information you need to create your barcodes wthout a problem. One remark: you do need to know enough about barcodes and what you can and can’t input in the input fields with some of them. If you ack that knowledge, Barcode Plugin will seem to malfunction.

At the end of the day, the man or woman who will be using the Barcode Plugin will probably work with one or a couple of barcode types at a time. If you’re designing a book cover and must include the ISBN code, you can hardly go wrong with Barcode Plugin.

The resulting barcodes look excellent as they are vector-based, so you could resize them at will, but to stay within the limits of each barcode type, you can’t just resize those codes at will. The Barcode Plugin therefore has a drop-down menu with the allowed ratios for the EAN family. For other barcodes you can enter a resize percentage, after which the plug-in will calculate the correct meausrements.

Although barcodes look dull and uninteresting, I consider Barcode Plugin to be a tool on the same level as Avenza MAPublisher. The cartography plug-in MAPublisher also lets you design all the parameters from wthin the MAPublisher system, to make sure the whole drawing is correct. Barcode Plugin does the same, but for barcodes.