Re: Merge of fax cover and content

[Leslie Mikesell <les@Mcs.Net>]

> Here is a question.  We are going to send out a large volumn of fax and
> each fax is about half page long.  I would like to generate a small fax
> cover and put this cover on top of the fax content.  I know even I put
> them together, they will not exceed 1 page.  So, has anybody done this
> before or did I miss something in the documentation?  ( This is
> not the same as sending out a fax cover first and then the content page,
> the difference is if I send the cover first, then the fax machine which
> receive this fax will cut the small cover apart from the second page.
> and they look very odd. )

I've always wanted something even more generic but was never able to
convice Sam to do it and was too lazy to do it myself.  I wish faxcover
had the ability to do EPS inclusion as a preprocessing step with
a bit of meta-language to specify the size and filenames that might
be pulled from the user's home directory.  My idea was to build a
generic cover page with a standard text portion where the To:/From:
etc. expand as they do now, but allow a custom logo depending on
who was sending (we have several internal business units sharing
the same networked equipment).  And creating a new cover would only
require software that knows how to create an EPS file - you wouldn't
have to muck around with the postscript afterwards.

In your scenario you would be able to create your fax content as an
eps, then build a cover page that placed it the way you want.  Actually
you could probably coax ghostscript into doing this for you if you
know how to do postscript inclusions but it would be easier at a
higher level.  I've seen a tool that does EPS positioning/scaling
somewhere and it didn't look too complicated as long as the file
had the required boundingbox entry.  Is anyone interested in adding
this feature?

Les Mikesell
  les@mcs.com