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@kralo
Created August 10, 2025 18:22
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The (sad?) state of QRCodes in Debian 13/Trixie

Generate QRCode

The debian 13.0 default/gnome live dvd,

  • can generate simple QRCodes in Libreoffice ("From the menu bar: Choose Insert - OLE Object - QR and Barcode.")

qrencode

Although libqrencode4 is installed, it is missing qrencode by default.

qrencode works nicely and supports creating linked/sequenced QRCodes, i.e. "structured Append".

However, it has a bug and does not support inputting enough data to max out 16codes*2953 bytes.

$ head -c 15000 /dev/urandom | qrencode -S -v40 -8 -t png -o random.png
Input data is too large.

It works with small data, though. If your reader supports it, this should produce echo -n "This sentence should appear in order" | qrencode -S -v1 -t png -o structured

structured-02 structured-03 structured-01

QR Decode

zbarimg

zbarimg works quite nicely.

$ zbarimg structured-comb.png 
QR-Code:This sentence should appear in order
scanned 1 barcode symbols from 1 images in 0 seconds

zbarcam-gtk

Crashes:

$ zbarcam-gtk 
zbarcam-gtk: symbol.c:211: _zbar_get_symbol_hash: Zusicherung »h >= 0 && h < NUM_SYMS« nicht erfüllt.
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