Funny,
we just had the same problem and solved it using TeX, since we we're already generating some TeX-documents from a perl script.

We used this package: ftp://ftp.dante.de/pub/tex/fonts/barcodes/willadt/ and the result is very very nice. Furthermore it is easily achieved (once you got that package installed, which is not as easy as it could be).

If you encounter problems with that package, contact me; maybe I can help.

Yes, yes, it's not really a perlish answer, but it works very fine!

Regards...

Stefan