Creating barcodes for Pixelmator Pro

With Pixelmator Pro you can create vector-based art, bitmap art and — up to a point — a layout design. Layout design often comes with a need to create and position barcodes. As there are no barcode plug-ins for Pixelmator Pro that manage to create industry-standard barcodes, people might be tempted to treat a barcode as a pattern. Unfortunately, that won’t work. In order to create industry-standard barcodes that can be scanned by any barcode scanner, you’ll need an app that is designed for the job.

You could use a barcode font, but the actual process of creating the barcode can be very challenging. Things can become very get tricky when using fonts for barcodes like Code 128, Interleaved 2 of 5 and others, as the data encoding requirements can be quite complex. For example, the encoding might need to be converted to a string of characters that does not even come close to the human-readable data.

Barcode Producer, on the other hand, is a stand-alone app that you use to create industry-standard barcodes that can be read with any barcode scanner and that offers total control over the output quality.

One thing to keep in mind when you’re creating barcodes for use with Pixelmator Pro is that the app does not recognize EPS files. This means that you cannot use the very best format with Pixelmator Pro; you best export the barcode to PDF, which the app does import/place.

Step 1: Create a document in Pixelmator Pro and set up your layout design.

Step 2: Create your barcode in Barcode Producer — in this example, an ISBN code — and save it to PDF.

Step 3: Drag and drop the PDF file into the Pixelmator Pro window, approximately where you want it to appear.

And that’s it. You can now nudge the barcode in place. To position it exactly where you want it, Pixelmator Pro has Smart Guide assistance and a grid (set up in the Preferences window).

Whatever you do, do not resize the barcode. Barcode Producer ensures the proper size and ratios are set automatically. Tampering with the size may change the resolution and length-width ratios.