Barcode Producer 26 brings dozens of new features
A ground-up modernization of Barcode Producer on Mac and Windows. The headline is Physical Preview: drop your value in, pick a scene – a book back, a retail carton, produce, medicine, signage – and your barcode renders live on a real-world object at production-accurate scale, with your colors, your text, your margins.
Version 26 reaches well past the preview. A few of the bigger pieces:
A rewritten Symbology Guide
Completely new: a modern tile-based layout with plain-language descriptions, richer previews, and search that actually finds what you mean. It's the front door to every symbology Barcode Producer makes – and now the home of Barcode Camera too.
Barcode Camera
Point your camera at any barcode and Barcode Producer reads it, right inside the Symbology Guide. Identify an unknown symbology, verify that a printed sample carries the value you expect, then recreate it as an editable barcode in a click. The fastest way yet to turn something on a shelf into something you can work with.
New symbologies
The 2D workhorses are in – Data Matrix for direct-mark on electronics and pharma, PDF417 for boarding passes, shipping documents, and IDs. The full GS1 DataBar family joins them for coupons and perishable produce. And QR Code, long a Mac feature, now generates on Windows too.
Send to Sketch, Figma, and Affinity
One-click hand-off, vector all the way out. Drop a barcode straight into Sketch, Figma, or Affinity (from Canva) at production scale – just as it already does in Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign.
A new Automator engine with merge fields
Run a spreadsheet through the rebuilt Automator and pull product names, prices, SKUs, and lot numbers straight from your columns into any custom text slot. Threaded for speed, with TSV import built in.
Dark mode, PNG output, kerning, and Apple Silicon
A modernized interface with full Dark mode, including new Checkerboard preview backgrounds. PNG joins the export formats. A new font engine brings automatic PostScript kerning – metric-aware spacing, ligature pairs and all. And on the Mac, Barcode Producer now runs natively on Apple Silicon.
- A modernized interface throughout – new toolbars, button and list styling, and a new app icon at home on the latest macOS.
- Customizable finishing-border color, plus more control over custom text objects (side, justification, flip).
- Updated GS1 Application Identifier metadata with comprehensive format validation; ISSN now supports 5-digit add-ons.
- Hold Option while saving to drop a barcode straight to the desktop. macOS gains a standard Window menu and improved PDF support.
- Larger, higher-quality previews, with a 20× speed-up in scene rendering on macOS.
- Magazine preview scenes now appear for the ISSN symbology.
- Clearer Account & Software Activation window, with in-app screenshots updated for the new view-mode controls.
- Improved Data Matrix GS1 element-string validation.
- Better barcode reports, and broad performance improvements.
- macOS now prioritizes ps2pdf over pstopdf for PDF output.
- Windows: removed an unnecessary restart from the installer.
- Under the hood: compiler-optimized for speed, refreshed APIs and frameworks, and over a thousand internal improvements.
- GS1 element-string human-readable text now reflects changes to the value.
- Restored reordering of element strings for GS1-128 and DataBar Expanded / Expanded Stacked.
- Fixed the initial format selection in the GS1-128 Coupon (Obsolete) editor.
- The View menu now reflects the currently selected view mode.
- EPS: bars are now properly closed and joined before filling.
- EPS: added Title, LanguageLevel, and EOF DSC fields, with metadata updated to DSC v3 and setpagesize removed.
- Windows: fixed the software-update framework.
- Windows: improved text display in the welcome dialog.