While I was working on mailing the 262nd edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, I noticed for the first time that our newsletter host, Buttondown, provides a QR code for our newsletter. I decided to add that QR code to the new version of our Newsletter sign-up page. But then a thought came to me: Why stop there? Maybe The New Leaf Journal needs a QR code. While I have used our fictional dialogue duo to caution against opening random QR codes in the past, I trust that New Leaf Journal readers can trust a nifty QR code pointing to our humble home-page.
I have never generated my own QR code before. Thus, I needed a tool. I ran a quick search for an open source QR code generator and came across GitHub user nayuki’s QR-Code-generator repository. The project introduction begins as follows:
This project aims to be the best, clearest QR Code generator library in multiple languages. The primary goals are flexible options and absolute correctness. Secondary goals are compact implementation size and good documentation comments.
The description sounded like what I needed. As an extra bonus, the project comes with a home page and live demo. I followed the link to the demo and was led to the Project Nayuki QR Code generator library.
Below the same introduction we saw in the GitHub repository was the Live demo, which includes a field for the text you want in your QR code. Below the text field is the resulting QR code, which changes as you enter text. There are numerous toggles below the QR code itself:
- Error Correction (four levels)
- Output format (Bitmap or Vector)
- Border (in modules)
- Scales (in pixels per module)
- Colors (light, which is for the QR code background, and dark, which is for the code itself)
- Version range (1 through 40)
- Mask pattern (-1 for automatic or value between 0-7)
- Boost ECC (yes or no)
I played around with the options to create a New Leaf Journal home page QR code. See how it looked in the generator below:
I opted for a bitmap (.png) QR code instead of a vector. I shrunk the border and changed the background and QR code colors to make The New Leaf Journal theme. I also set “Error correction” to “high” because I figured “why not?” I did not fiddle with the other options since (A) I do not know what they all do, and (B) I was satisfied with the resulting QR code. I downloaded my new QR code, which you can see below.
Of course, before posting my QR code, I had to make sure it works. At the moment, my main phone is a Google Pixel 3a XL running Ubuntu Touch. I did not have a QR code app on hand, so I installed Jan Belohoubek’s Tagger app and used it to scan my code.
The code worked as expected.
While I am not an expert on QR code generation, consider me impressed with Project Nayuki’s QR Code generator. It has nice features from being able to choose between two file formats to changing the size and color of the QR code itself. While the online demo works, the library is also available to download and run locally (the most recent version as of this date is v1.8.0, which was published on April 17, 2022). The project is open source pursuant to the MIT license.
