Generators

Generate codes, identifiers, documents, numbers, and content with browser-based tools.

Codes people scan, and which symbology to use

QR codes and barcodes are not interchangeable. A QR code holds a few thousand characters and is read by any phone camera, which makes it the right choice for a link on a poster, a menu, contact details, or a wifi handoff. A linear barcode holds a short identifier and is read by dedicated scanners at a counter.

Which barcode you need depends on where it will be scanned. EAN-13 and UPC-A are retail standards tied to registered product numbers, so they are only meaningful if the number belongs to you — inventing one produces a code that scans to somebody else's product. Code 128 and Code 39 encode arbitrary text, which is what you want for internal asset tags, shelf labels, and shipping references where no registry is involved.

Scanning is the other half of the loop. Reading a code back from an image or a camera confirms the generated output actually resolves to what you intended before it goes to print.

Documents you can hand to someone else

Resumes and invoices are the two documents people most often need once, urgently, and in PDF. The usual online builders want an account first, keep the document on their servers, and increasingly put the download behind a subscription.

Both generators here assemble the PDF in the browser from what you type and hand it straight back as a download. There is no account, and the contents — your employment history, or a client's name and billing amounts — are never transmitted, which matters more for an invoice than most people stop to consider.

The tradeoff is honest: because nothing is stored, closing the tab loses the draft. Download the PDF before you navigate away, and keep it if you expect to revise it later.

Placeholders, palettes, and schedules

The rest of this category covers the small generation tasks that interrupt other work. Placeholder paragraphs fill a layout so you can judge spacing and line length before the real copy exists. A seed colour expands into complementary, analogous, triadic, and monochromatic schemes, which is faster than assembling a palette by eye and exports as JSON for use elsewhere.

Cron expressions are their own small trap: five fields with no forgiveness, where a misplaced asterisk turns a monthly job into one that runs every minute. Building the expression from a described schedule and reading the plain-language summary back is the reliable way to confirm it means what you intended before it reaches a crontab.

Random numbers round it out, drawn from the browser's cryptographic source for draws, sampling, and test fixtures. Generated output usually needs somewhere to go next — a QR code onto a printed page, a palette into a contrast check — and the directory covers both halves of that.

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