Recently, I looked in possible solutions with a friend to generate “3of9 barcodes”. He wanted no dependency aside PHP itself, which excluded GD. The point is to print barcodes, not dump them to the screen, and so required a printable solution.

So I tought about sIFR: simply dump a good font (font 1, font 2, …) in a flash animation.

Of course that failed because of flash’s inerent inability to be printed (seems to be rendered at the browser’s screen resolution, then scaled).

The next thing I looked into, was SVG.