ean13.wrid.org — EAN‑13 barcodes as infrastructure

What is this?

ean13.wrid.org is a simple, public service that generates EAN‑13 barcodes as standards-compliant images (SVG or PNG). It is designed for long-term use in publishing, retail, libraries, education, and archival material.

No tracking. No analytics. No URL shorteners. Just encoding.

Generate an EAN‑13 barcode

The result will be returned as an image (SVG by default, PNG if requested via the Accept header).

How to use it

https://ean13.wrid.org?encode=9780306406157
https://ean13.wrid.org?encode=9780306406157&px=1200&h=320 (PNG size)
Returns image/svg+xml or image/png based on the Accept header
Cacheable and deterministic

You can embed the result directly in documents, PDFs, or HTML without further processing.

Parameters

encode — EAN‑13 digits to encode (required; accepts 12 digits to auto-add the check digit, or 13 digits with a valid check digit)
px — Target PNG width in pixels (optional; default 600; min 300; max 2400)
h — Bar height in pixels (optional; default 260; min 80; max 600)

Content negotiation

This service supports HTTP content negotiation. The same URL can return different representations depending on the Accept header sent by the client.

image/svg+xml — returns an SVG EAN‑13 barcode (default)
image/png — returns a PNG EAN‑13 barcode
text/html — returns this documentation page

This allows the same endpoint to be used interactively by humans and programmatically by machines, without changing URLs.

CURL Examples

Generate SVG

curl -H "Accept: image/svg+xml" \
  "https://ean13.wrid.org/?encode=9780306406157" \
  --output ean13.svg

Generate PNG

curl -H "Accept: image/png" \
  "https://ean13.wrid.org/?encode=9780306406157" \
  --output ean13.png

Generate PNG with custom size

curl -H "Accept: image/png" \
  "https://ean13.wrid.org/?encode=9780306406157&px=1200&h=320" \
  --output ean13-1200x320.png

Why another barcode generator?

Most barcode generators today are marketing tools. This one is infrastructure.

No dependency on third-party APIs
Open, inspectable output
Stable URLs
Built for long-lived documents

What’s next?

In the future, paths like ean13.wrid.org/<id> will resolve QR codes backed by WRID records.

The current ?encode= endpoint will remain available.