How to resize an ISBN barcode

This page is aimed mainly at people who are publishing with companies such as Lulu, Createspace (hereafter, "CS") and Lightning Source (hereafter, "LSI") and need to place barcodes on their books.

You've bought a block of ISBN numbers. Now you need to place them on your books. What you need on your book is not just the ISBN but the barcode. This ISBN barcode is also known as a Bookland EAN.

CS does a great job of producing eye-pleasing barcodes because they print them in Arial instead of the standard OCRB font. However, the CS box is way large (two inches wide) to blend discretely on most book covers. LSI gives you a well-sized ISBN barcode on its cover templates, but the font looks awful. How to format your barcode to a size that you like, using fonts that look good on your cover?

Here is one of the challenges. You cannot just take a jpg image of an ISBN barcode and resize it. That is because the solid black bars will become pixellated. Or they will acquire grey pixels next to the black pixels. (This is known as anti-aliasing.) The grey pixels are useful for for human eyes, but they are not good for barcode scanners.

Making Pretty ISBN Barcodes: a Tutorial

I have tried several programs that claim to output good looking Bookland EAN barcodes. The problem is that they only output barcodes as image files, such as JPG or TIFF. Why is that a problem? Because if you resize the picture, the bars will suffer from anti-aliasing and other such resizing issues. You want perfect straight bars on your bar code, so what you need is a barcode in a vector format such as EPS.

I have been told of two free pieces of software that can apparently produce EAN-13 vector barcodes. I have tried neither. The first is Inkscape, supplemented with the barcode extension (Effects, Render, Barcode) or Inkbar, another barcode extension. The second is Scribus, using the Scribus barcode generator. Please use the comment form at the bottom if you have experience with this that you can share.

If you are unfamilar with some of the terms mentioned above, I recommend you spend $10 to buy your barcode from a commercial service such as this one. But if you feel competent with graphic files and are willing to take the risk, follow this guide.

CS provides pretty barcodes, but you can't resize them. LSI provides barcodes you can resize, but they're not pretty. Here's how to make a pretty ISBN barcode of the size you want. LSI customers, there is a special tutorial for you: jump to the LSI ISBN section below.

WARNING! One person told me he followed the instructions on this page, resized a barcode, printed it, and was unable to scan it! You are undertaking this exercise as a science experiment, at your own risk… :)

1. Generate the ISBN barcode

Go to the Free EAN-13 barcode generator.
Just before step 1, click the "Yeah" box;
At step 1, paste the ISBN number;
At step 5, don't mess with the font: that feature doesn't work;
At step 6, click "to get to the other side";
Save the EPS file.

2. Resize the ISBN barcode

The generator gives you a barcode that is 2.236 inches wide, close to the EAN Bookland spec. But the industry standard for ISBN barcodes is a 92% magnification of the spec. The spec allows you to magnify the ISBN barcode from 80% to 200%. I like 80%, which is also the preferred LSI size (1.75 inches wide by 1-inch high). This size competes less with other design elements on the cover. Are you ready for a long list of steps? Here we go.

- Open the EPS in Photoshop and note its dimensions, eg, 2.236 x 1.347.
- Do not resize the ISBN EPS file in Photoshop: it will rasterize and you will lose resolution in the bars.
- Close Photoshop, open Indesign. Why Indesign? Illustrator doesn't like resizing the ISBN barcodes produced with the free generator.
- Open the sample Indesign ISBN file I made for this purpose—or create your own file and try to follow along with the rest of the instructions.
- Open the Layers panel (Window / Layers) and click on the "eye icons" to see what's in each layer. Basically, there is a barcode in the "Sample barcode" layer, then white boxes to hide the numbers, then numbers formatted the way we like them.
- A little off the artboard, place the EPS file (Ctrl + D).
- Right-click, choose Transform, Scale. Enter the percentages that will bring the ISBN barcode to 1.75 x 1 (if the original dimensions are those noted above, the percentages will be 78.2647585 for X and 74.2390497 for Y). If you don't like to compute percentages, just use this form:

- The barcode should now be the right size. Cut it (Ctrl + X), select the "Place here layer", paste the barcode there, and drag if needed to position it.
- Hide the "Sample barcode layer".
- In the "White boxes" layer, if needed, adjust the position of the white boxes to hide the new barcode's numbers. (Click Ctrl+A to show all the white boxes, and magnify to make sure the edges of the barcode are clean.)
- In the "Numbers" layer, enter the appropriate numbers.
- Select File, Export, Adobe PDF (this lets us export in CMYK).
- Choose PDF/X-1a:2001. Check that the Output is CMYK.
- Open the PDF barcode file in Photoshop, being careful to choose these options:
— Crop to artbox to preserve the original size,
— CMYK,
— Uncheck AntiAlias.
- With the Eyedropper, check that the black is 100%.
- With the Zoom, check that the bars are not aliased.
- Flatten the file. Save as a TIFF file (CMYK). Done!

If, for whatever reason, a barcode you produce with this method doesn't scan, feel free to contact me through the form. But don't ask me for money, I accept no liability whatsoever for the information on this page :)

Attractive ISBN Barcodes for LSI customers

For some reason, LSI sometimes replaces the ISBN barcodes I generate with the method above. Here's my current process for LSI barcodes.

- Generate a cover template.
- Open it in Illustrator.
- Change the document color mode to CMYK.
- Lasso the barcode. Change the color to 100% K, excluding the rectangle path.
- Crop close the ISBN barcode (getting rid of the first line of numbers and of the "9" on the left).
- Export as TIFF, 300dpi, NO ANTI-ALIAS, do not embed profile. Warning: If you export at 600dpi, you will have to resize later and you will have an anti-aliasing problem.
- Open my Indesign ISBN template.
- Place the TIFF barcode.
- If it looks blurry, do not freak out. Right-click, choose the high-quality display setting.
- Show the Layers panel (Window / Layers), check and uncheck the layers to see what they do. The white boxes will cover the numbers, the numbers layer will display the better-looking numbers.
- Play with the white boxes to cover the TIFF numbers.
- Put in the right numbers.
- Zoom in close and scrutinize the portions between numbers and bars to check that everything is clean.
- File, Export, Adobe PDF (this lets us export in CMYK). Choose PDF/X-1a:2001.
- You can stop there and use the PDF, or create a TIFF:
- Open the PDF barcode file in Photoshop, being careful to choose these options:
— Crop to artbox to preserve the original size,
— CMYK,
— Uncheck AntiAlias.
- With the Eyedropper, check that the color 100% K.
- With the Zoom, check that the bars are not aliased.
- Flatten the file. Save as TIFF (CMYK). Done!

Wishing you a life full of pretty and happy ISBN barcodes,

Smiles,

Andy

ps: If you have enjoyed this page, I would be immensely grateful if you would link to it, bookmark it or share it. You can also comment using the form below.