CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have been working on a way to print a USPS barcode on CiviCRM mailing labels, which I could hopefully share.  There is a design choice to make on which I'd like some input.

1.  The relatively easy way is to incorporate the official USPS released module.  It comes as a precompiled C binary for encoding and a truetype font package.  The font is easy to incorporate into CiviCRM, so that is not an issue.  The precompiled C binary is not open source although it does not appear to have any license associated with it.  It is not difficult to make calls to this binary with exec() in PHP and incorporate that into Civicrm.  They also have a java wrapper which calls the module.  Does this create a license problem for us under the AGPL?  And, it creates a platform dependency for CiviCRM, in that you would have to make sure that the appropriate binary object was installed for linux vs. windows vs. mac vs. whatever.

2.  The hard way is to write the PHP to follow the USPS spec for encoding the data, instead of the binary module, and then use the font to print it.  The spec is a beast and it would be no joke to get it working correctly.  See this document. There is a lot of, divide this string up into 5-bit segments, divide each by 1365, and look up the result in this massive table, while standing on your left foot and holding your mouth just so.   It would be a lot of work and would have to be thoroughly tested.

Thoughts, anyone?