flexfax: Re: format files

[Bill Campbell <bill@dagney.celestial.com>]

On Fri, Aug 22, 1997 at 10:01:54PM +0800, Super-User wrote:
...
>does anyone know of ANY way to convert microsoft word documents for fax in
>an automated way?  has anyone even heard rumors of a unix ms-word
>viewer/converter?  if it must be done through windows, does the
>word-viewer microsoft gives away accept command-line options to simply
>print a file on command line (to a captured postscript virtual printer)?
>in this case i imagine you could get away with sharing a directory via
>samba, and calling a batch file through hummingbird's inetd (part of
>exceed for nt)..
>anyone??

We do this via a Unix printer accessed via SAMBA on the Unix box.  As far
as M$-Word is concerned, it's just a PostScript printer.  We have a SYSV
type printer interface script that extracts the fax number from the
PostScript using ps2ascii (after stripping the M$ garbage memory tests :-).
The fax number is simply a pattern ``Fax: phone_number'' where phone_number
is a pattern that looks like a telephone number.  Once it has the phone
number it sends that via sendfax with the cleaned up PostScript file as
input.

This printer interface works with any text or PostScript file so can be
used from any Unix or DOS/Windows client.

Bill
--
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