This is a small utility which will encode anything you want (within the limits of the specification) to a QR code. It doesn't do any processing on the input though, so if you want something complex, like a Salamander tag, you'll have to find another utility to generate the input. It's nice for creating triage tags though.

The project uses the Gradle wrapper, so once you have cloned the repository there is no additional setup. Just run the build script:

$ ./gradlew build

You can also use the install task to create an installable directory:

$ ./gradlew install

This will create the build/install/quick-encode directory, which can be copied to a suitable location in your file system. Just add the bin sub-directory to your path and you can run quick-encode from a command prompt.

If you just wnat to run the utility without installing it, you can use the run task if you don't mind the awkward way of handling command line arguments:

$ ./gradlew run --args='-w 256 my-barcode-data.txt'

Alternatively, you can use the install task and execute the resulting script in-place. As a convenience, you could then symlink the script into your PATH so you don't have to specify the script's path everytime you run it:

$ ./gradlew install
$ build/install/quick-encode/bin/quick-encode -w 256 my-barcode-data.txt

Any positional arguments provided to the utility are treated as names of files containing data to encode. Multiple files may be provided and they will all be encoded to separate barcodes. Barcodes are output as PNGs where the file name is the file name of the input with ".png" appended to the end.

It is possible to set the dimensions of the barcode with two command line options. The width, in pixels, may be specified with --width or -w, while the height, also in pixels, may be specified with --height or -h. The default is to output a PNG that is 512 pixels in both dimensions.