QR Studio

A modern QR code generator built with GTK4 and libadwaita, featuring a Material 3 design layer and a vector-first rendering architecture.

Features

Content Types

• Plain Text — Freeform text with full QR capacity indicator
• URL — Dedicated "Website" tab with auto-prepended https:// for domains
• WiFi — Network name, password, encryption type
• vCard — Contact cards with name, phone, email, organization, URL
• Calendar — Events with title, location, start/end datetime
• GPS — Interactive map with search autocomplete (Photon API), marker placement, coordinates
• SMS — Phone number with country code dropdown (153 countries with flag emojis)

Design & Customization

• Dot styles — Rounded, Square, Dots, Diamond, Custom SVG
• Corner styles — Independent corner square and corner dot styling
• Color picker with live harmony suggestions (complementary, triadic, analogous, split-complementary)
• Gradient fills — Horizontal, Vertical, Diagonal, Radial with configurable colors
• Logo embedding — Drag & drop image support, automatic raster-to-vector tracing (vtracer)
• Outer text — Custom label text with Pango system font selection
• Frame styles — None, Simple, Rounded, Banner
• Shadow — Adjustable drop shadow with offset
• SVG icon support — Direct vector embedding for crisp logos at any size

GPS Map

• 4 Map styles — Positron, Bright, Dark, Fiord (OpenFreeMap vector tiles)
• Language-aware labels — Map labels automatically adapt to the selected UI language
• Interactive map — Click to place marker, search with autocomplete (Photon API)
• Raster fallback — Automatically falls back to CartoDB raster tiles if vector rendering is unavailable

Export

• PNG — Raster export at custom resolution
• SVG — Scalable vector export
• PDF — Print-ready PDF output with label sheet support
• GIF — Animated gradient export
• Batch export — CSV-driven bulk QR code generation
• Clipboard — Copy as PNG or SVG directly

Import

• QR code import — Import and decode existing QR codes from image files (PNG, JPEG, SVG). Auto-detects content type (WiFi, vCard, Calendar, GPS, SMS, URL, Text) and fills in all fields.

UX

• 10 GPU-accelerated CSS animations — Sidebar slide, QR appear, error shake, content-type transitions, toast notifications, color button pop, logo drop bounce, preview morph, popover entrance
• Content validation — Real-time validation for email, GPS coordinates, phone numbers
• Capacity indicator — Color-coded progress bar (green → yellow → red) with pulse animation at >90%
• Scan verification — Background-thread QR scanability check on every render
• Drag & Drop — Drop images onto preview or logo area
• Transparency checkerboard — Visual feedback for transparent backgrounds
• i18n — 9 languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese (BR), Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified)
• Print size calculator — Calculate physical print dimensions from module size and DPI
• Style presets — Built-in and user-defined style presets with import/export (JSON)
• Undo/Redo — Full undo/redo support for style changes
• Session save/restore — Templates with import/export
• Collapsible sidebar — Animated toggle for more preview space
• Keyboard shortcuts — Global shortcuts for common actions (press Ctrl+? for overview)
• Persistent preferences — GSettings-backed window size, sidebar width, and more

CLI Mode

Headless QR code generation without GUI, ideal for scripting and batch processing:

qr_studio --cli --text "Hello World" --output qr.png
qr_studio --cli --wifi-ssid "MyNetwork" --wifi-password "secret" --output wifi.svg

Supports all content types, dot/corner styles, gradients, frames, and output formats (PNG, SVG, PDF).

Installation

Linux (AppImage)

Download from Releases, then:

chmod +x QR_Studio-*-x86_64.AppImage
./QR_Studio-*-x86_64.AppImage

The AppImage includes a smart launcher that detects system GTK4 + libadwaita and uses them when available, falling back to bundled libraries otherwise. Set QR_STUDIO_DEBUG=1 for diagnostics.

Linux (Flatpak)

Flatpak builds are available from Releases. Flathub submission is planned.

Windows

Download the MSIX installer or portable ZIP from Releases.

MSIX installer:

1. Install the included signing certificate (QRStudioSigning.cer) into "Trusted Root Certification Authorities"
2. Double-click the .msix file to install

Portable ZIP: Extract anywhere and run qr_studio.exe. All required DLLs, GTK schemas, and icon themes are bundled.

Building from Source

Prerequisites

Linux (Arch Linux):

sudo pacman -S gtk4 libadwaita libshumate librsvg gdk-pixbuf2 pkgconf rust

Linux (Ubuntu 24.04+):

sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev libshumate-dev librsvg2-dev \
  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev libsoup-3.0-dev libjson-glib-dev libsqlite3-dev \
  libprotobuf-c-dev pkg-config rustc cargo

Windows: Build via GitHub Actions (MSYS2/MinGW64). See .github/workflows/build-windows.yml.

Build & Run

git clone https://github.com/SlobCoder/qr_studio.git
cd qr_studio
cargo build --release
./target/release/qr_studio

Build CLI Only (No GUI Dependencies)

cargo build --release --no-default-features --features cli
./target/release/qr_studio --cli --text "Hello" --output qr.png

Build AppImage

./build_appimage.sh

Requires: cargo, mksquashfs, wget.

Build Flatpak

cd flatpak
flatpak-builder --install --user install-dir io.github.SlobCoder.qr_studio.yaml

Technology Stack

Component	Technology
Language	Rust
UI Framework	GTK4 + libadwaita
Design Layer	Material 3
Map Widget	libshumate (OpenFreeMap vector tiles)
QR Generation	qrcode crate
QR Decoding	rqrr
Vector Tracing	vtracer
Image Processing	image crate
PDF Export	printpdf
SVG Rasterization	gdk-pixbuf + librsvg (GUI) / resvg (CLI)
Font Enumeration	Pango
HTTP Client	reqwest (Photon API, TileJSON)
CLI Parsing	clap
Parallelism	rayon

Architecture

src/
├── main.rs           # Application entry, CSS, window setup
├── ui.rs             # UI layout, signal handlers, widgets
├── render.rs         # QR code rendering pipeline
├── svg.rs            # SVG generation, parsing, rasterization
├── helpers.rs        # QR data generation, templates, file I/O
├── types.rs          # State management, ToastType, shared types
├── i18n.rs           # Internationalization (9 languages)
├── map_styles.rs     # OpenFreeMap vector tile styles, localization
├── country_codes.rs  # 153 country entries with flag emojis
├── cli.rs            # Headless CLI mode (no GUI required)
├── tests.rs          # Unit tests and SVG snapshot tests
└── styles/           # Embedded map style JSONs (Positron, Bright, Dark, Fiord)

Vector-first rendering: render_vector_svg() generates a complete SVG first, then rasterize_svg() converts to raster via gdk-pixbuf/librsvg for display and export.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.