Reduce border width on QR Codes generated by ZXing?

Question

I\'m using com.google.zxing.qrcode.QRCodeWriter to encode data and com.google.zxing.client.j2se.MatrixToImageWriter to generate the QR Code image. On a

Answer 1

Even by setting EncodeHintType.MARGIN to 0, the algorithm that convert the QRCode "dot" matrix to pixels data can generate a small margin (the algorithm enforce a constant number of pixels per dots, so the margin pixel size is the remainder of the integer division of pixels size by QR-Code dot size).

However you can completely bypass this "dot to pixel" generation: you compute the QRCode dot matrix directly by calling the public com.google.zxing.qrcode.encoder.Encoder class, and generate the pixel image yourself. Code below:

// Step 1 - generate the QRCode dot array
Map hints = new HashMap(1);
hints.put(EncodeHintType.CHARACTER_SET, "UTF-8");
QRCode qrCode = Encoder.encode(what, ErrorCorrectionLevel.L, hints);

// Step 2 - create a BufferedImage out of this array
int width = qrCode.getMatrix().getWidth();
int height = qrCode.getMatrix().getHeight();
BufferedImage image = new BufferedImage(width, height, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
int[] rgbArray = new int[width * height];
int i = 0;
for (int y = 0; y < height; y++) {
  for (int x = 0; x < width; x++) {
    rgbArray[i] = qrCode.getMatrix().get(x, y) > 0 ? 0xFFFFFF : 0x000000;
    i++;
} }
image.setRGB(0, 0, width, height, rgbArray, 0, width);

The conversion of the BufferedImage to PNG data is left as an exercise to the reader. You can also scale the image by setting a fixed number of pixels per dots.

It's usually more optimized that way, the generated image size is the smallest possible. If you rely on client to scale the image (w/o blur) you do not need more than 1 pixel per dot.