ElementDrawer for barcodes with interpretation line throwing on OSX-Arm64/.NET 7.0

[christianklauss]

Environment: OSX (Ventura) on Apple Silicon with .NET 7.0

I've worked on a REST wrapper around some ZPL/Label Printing functionality and I've noticed that using the Viewer library to generate barcodes that contain an interpretation line does not work on my dev machine even if making libgdiplus available (with that is running fine with the current /dotnet/sdk:7.0 docker image though, so it's not really a blocker for the project).

var labelFont = new SKFont(labelTypeFace, labelFontSize).ToSystemDrawingFont();
int labelHeight = barcode.PrintInterpretationLine ? labelFont.Height : 0;

BinaryKits.Zpl/src/BinaryKits.Zpl.Viewer/ElementDrawers/Barcode128ElementDrawer.cs

Line 100 in 93caafc

int labelHeight = barcode.PrintInterpretationLine ? labelFont.Height : 0;

The labelFont.Height property is throwing in these cases. I also tried replacing the font loader with a custom one but it didn't change the outcome. Since MS is not pursuing cross-platform support for System.Common.Drawing I guess it would require dropping the dependency on that to support this scenario. I guess this might not be worth the effort given that the viewer is fine running in Docker but I just wanted to let you know (thanks for the whole library, was a huge time-saver).

[primo-ppcg]

@christianklauss thanks for the feedback.

For most barcode elements, a third-party library is used for rendering barnhill/barcodelib. Unfortunately, this library uses System.Drawing fonts for interpretation lines, rather than SkiaSharp types faces as are used by all other elements.

The resolution for this issue is to remove the dependency, and render barcodes directly from encoded data (which is already done for data matrices and QR codes).

[chrisandchris]

Just a heads-up, there was a PR that recently (a few days ago) got merged in barnhill/barcodelib that removed the dependency to System.Drawing and now uses SkiaSharp which made it into their 3.0.0 release.

See: barnhill/barcodelib#152