Question

I need a QR code generator that generates 21500 unique serial number with a QR stamp, and export every 1000 code on a one PDF file, so we’ll have 22 PDF file.
How can I do that?

Answer 1

Some time ago I’ve done a similar thing using Python, qrencode and LaTeX. I’ve modified my old code to fit your needs. I assumed you want A4 pages. The contents of the QR Codes are the PMY00001 to PMY22000 ASCII strings.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import random, base64, string, os, sys

width=7.7
height=7

print "\\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{report}"
print "\\usepackage[absolute]{textpos}"
print "\\usepackage{nopageno}"
print "\\usepackage{graphicx}"
print "\\setlength{\\TPHorizModule}{1mm}"
print "\\setlength{\\TPVertModule}{1mm}"
print "\\textblockorigin{10mm}{10mm}"
print "\\setlength{\\parskip}{0pt}"
print "\\setlength{\\parindent}{0pt}"
print "\\setlength{\\fboxsep}{0pt}"
print "\\setlength{\\tabcolsep}{0pt}"
print "\\renewcommand{\\baselinestretch}{0.8}"
print ""
print "\\begin{document}"

idx=int(sys.argv[1])

for i in range(0,25):
    for j in range(0,40):
        b = 'PMY%05d' % idx
        f = os.path.join("codes", b + ".png")
        ff = os.popen("qrencode -lH -o " + f, "w")
        ff.write(b)
        ff.close()
        print "\\begin{textblock}{" + str(width) + "}(" + str(width * i) + "," + str(height * j) + ")"
        print "\\includegraphics[height="+str(height)+"mm]{" + f + "}"
        print "\\end{textblock}"
        idx=idx+1
print "\\end{document}"

To use it, write it as e.g. qrgen.py, add execution permissions chmod +x qrgen.py, create codes directory: mkdir codes and run ./qrgen.py 0 >codes.tex to generate the codes.tex document and then pdflatex codes.tex to generate codes.pdf file. The 0 argument is the starting serial number.

To get 22 such sheets it’s best to use a loop:

for ((i=0;i<22;i++)); do ../qrgen.py $((i*1000+1)) >$i.tex; pdflatex $i.tex; done

Of course this is not the optimal solution – you can probably get a much faster one using Python qrencode library bindings instead of launching external qrencode program and some library for generating PDFs from Python directly instead of using pdflatex.