Printing QRcodes Using Dymo and Linux


Summary


The Dymo 400 series label printers work well on linux for printing QR codes.
The codes for a "Version 21" label sized 12mm x 12mm are recognized promptly by a mobile phone. A few problems setting up a printing scheme on linux are listed here.

Printing Issues

Dymo is supported by "Cups" on linux, but it seems to have a few bugs, which can be circumvented.
Printing multiple labels using "lpr file1 file2 ..." can cause queueing problems and jams the printer. The answer is to print each label/file individually, so that each label becomes a separate print job.
In some cases cups configuration does'nt seem to allow setting up the Dymo as a remote printer. This behaviour is a bit unpredictable.

Generating QRlabels


"Qrencode" works well for generating QR coded labels as .png files. Text files can be generated using "Imagemagick" convert or xfig. Difficulty arises when trying to combine multiple images onto a single label. "PNG" files can be combined to a larger png file, but not so well to a pdf file. Combining images of text and qrcode png files to a larger png, and then converting to a pdf using "img2pdf" works with much better image quality and scaling.

Decoding QRlabels


"Zbarimg" can be used to decode png images of QR codes.



"Zbarimg" can be used to decode png images of QR codes.