The back side landed last commit carrying text by default, and a back laid out
as text-only renders no code box at all. So a two-sided run came out with a
blank reverse, which reads as the code having failed rather than as a setting
doing exactly what it said. The back now defaults to carrying a code, takes its
own content per row, and chooses its own symbology - a QR on the front that
opens the record, a CODE128 on the back that the bench scanner already reads.
Text-only is refused while the back carries a code, and the contradiction is
reconciled on load, so a saved setting from the broken combination repairs
itself rather than printing another blank box of cards.
A picture can go on a label: above the code, beside it, or behind everything as
a watermark, on either side or both. The file is read in the browser and never
sent anywhere, which is what makes it usable at an air-gapped site, and it is
deliberately not saved between visits - a data URL runs to megabytes and would
take every sizing value with it when the quota gave out. The watermark says
plainly that it costs the scanner contrast.
The generator was a full-screen route with no navigation and a narrow column of
controls against the left edge. That shape exists so a print cannot put the
sidebar on label stock, which is a real hazard and the reason core's label pages
are built that way - but it is a hazard the print stylesheet can answer, and
style.css now hides the shell at print time. A tool someone spends ten minutes
in gets the navigation and the full width; the stock still gets nothing but
labels, confirmed against a print PDF rather than a preview.
Two smaller things found while checking the above. A test print paired each page
with a rendered code by loop position, while the codes are keyed to position in
the whole run, so a two-sided test card could carry the wrong code; the index
now travels with the page. And the back's dotted preview outline outspecified
the print reset, drawing a dashed rule down the edge of every second card.
A place for the small utilities a technician reaches for at a bench. The
plugin owns no API and no tables: every tool runs entirely in the browser,
so an air-gapped site gets them for free and a bad network cannot break
them. Adding the next tool is a view, a route, and one entry in tools.js.
First tool is a barcode/QR generator. Content is typed text, a URL, or a
CSV (content,label,copies - quoted fields and an optional header both
handled), so a batch of a few hundred is one paste. Label stock is
adjustable in inches with five presets, and the code renders to an SVG
data URI rather than a PNG: a bitmap gets downscaled to label size and
smears the module edges a scanner reads, where SVG rasterizes at the
printer's resolution with hard edges.
It also carries the dot-grid rule that is easy to get wrong by eye. A
thermal head cannot render a fraction of a dot, so a code sized off the
grid gets uneven modules; pick a DPI and the page says what the current
size lands on and what to use instead. The quiet zone is blank label
rather than white baked into the code, so it can be tuned - and it applies
to CODE128 too, which needs clear space at each end and was letting bars
run into the caption.
Tech Tools is the first bundled plugin that owns no schema, which two
guards did not model: it belongs in the universal installer profile, and
upgrade-all reports it 'no-migrations' where every plugin was assumed to
report 'ok'. The migration test now asserts that status explicitly for
schema-less plugins, so a table-owning plugin whose chain went missing
still fails.
