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Elabftwqrprint

Description

eLabFTW is a free and open source electronic lab notebook which can be used not only to log scientific activities in a lab, but also to keep track of physical and digital objects. Each object in the database can be accessed via a unique URL. To link the physical objects to the digital database entries, encoding these URL's into QR codes which can be printed on a sticker is very convenient. Brother makes a series of (semi-)professional label printers which are well suited for this purpose, and there is a python library that sends direct print instructions to these types of printers. This repository is a collection of command line tools for linking up the eLabFTW API to create QR codes from database objects and the brother-ql printer library to print them out.

Installation

$ pip install --user elabftwqrprint

Pro-tip: for safety it's always best to install things in a virtual environment

Note for Linux

It seems that when installing on Linux, the scripts are stored in ~/.local/bin or /user/local/bin. These may not be on the path, meaning that the scripts are not directly accessible through the shell. To add these locations to the path do

$ export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin

To make this a permanent thing whenever you open up a new shell add it to your shell config file, e.g. ~/.bashrc.

Usage

First you must configure the elabftw server information and the printer information with:

$ configure_elabftw

and

$ configure_printer

respectively. You will be guided through a number of prompts to enter the url to your elabFTW instance, your access token, your printer model, etc. The information you provide is stored in ~/.elabftwqrprint/elabconfig.yaml and ~/.elabftwqrprint/printerconfig.yaml respectively. These are different config files because you might want to create sticker images without having a Brother printer, or you might want to print stickers separate from elabFTW. For each PC you install this package on, you only have to do this once. If you change some settings you can directly edit the config files or re-run these config scripts.

After successfully creating the configuration, you can use the following commands:

$ list_elab_items  # view a table of your database items in the command line
$ find_items  # get a list of item id's that fit certain criteria

$ create_qr_sticker [TEXT]  # turn any string into a QR code sticker of a dimension suitable for the Brother printers
$ create_sticker_elab_item [ID]  # create a QR code sticker image from a database item in your elabFTW instance and save to a file

$ print_sticker_elab_item [ID]  # directly print a QR code sticker from a database item in your elabFTW instance
$ print_sticker [FILENAME]  # print a sticker from a file

You can check the different options with the -h or --help flags. The list and find commands have options to control which items get returned - you can specify categories, date boundaries and partial search strings for titles. The commands to create sticker images have a number of options to control how the stickers look, e.g. font, font size, QR code size, longer description to print next to the QR code...

The print_sticker_elab_item [ID] command should be the bread and butter command. You can feed it one ID derived from list_elab_items or multiple. You may also pipe id's from find_items to print_sticker_elab_item. For example:

$ find_items -s "copper" -m 20200301 | print_sticker_elab_item

should sequentially print all the database items that contain "copper" in the title and were created after 01/03/2020.

In addition, you can manually create the config file ~/.elabftwqrprint/formatting.yaml, with which you can override a number of defaults. The following options are recognized:

default_save_name: # name of file commands write image to by default
default_save_folder: # directory where default image is written to
version: # the version of QR code used, see documentation of qrcode package
error_correction: # error correction level, see documentation of qrcode package and help in commands
border: # number of squares for QR code border, see documentation of qrcode package
box_size: # number of pixels per box in the QR code, see documentation of qrcode package
short_text: # default short text written below QR code. Will override <date> <title> label used by default in create_sticker_elab_item, but will be overridden by -s flag.
long_text: # default long text written to the right of the QR code. Will be overridden by -l flag.
font: # path to truetype font file
font_size: # default font size
long_text_width: # approximate number of pixels occupied by long text line. If None, a best guess is estimated.
max_qr_size: # maximum side length of QR code in pixels.

Changelog

v0.1.0

  • bugfixes related to the verify flag to allow connections to local installs
  • added the options to pass eLabFTW connection arguments and printer configuration arguments in the relevant commands when one doesn't want to use the configuration from the config files

v0.0.5

  • minor bugfixes
  • added feature to allow multiple stickers to be printed with one command
  • added more advanced search functionality
  • added feature to allow search to be piped directly to print

v0.0.3

  • fixed some bugs related to sticker rotation
  • added more options for creating all stickers
  • improved inheritance of arguments between various scripts
  • added more user configurability with an extra config file