Re: flexfax: HylaFAX in Japan?

["Andrew S. Howell" <andy@tibco.com>]

>>>>> "John" == John Williams <williams@morinda.com> writes:

    John> Is anyone using HylaFAX in Japan?  I'm wondering if there
    John> are any issues with the phone system, or anything else which
    John> might be tricky to deal with.  I'm in the USA, but our
    John> company is going to be installing hylafax in our Japan
    John> office.

John,

	I'm using it both at home and at our office here in Tokyo. 

    John> Can WHFC do kanji?

I have not used WHFC to much. In fact, the last time it tried it, I
ran into a problem that required to re-install service pack 3 on
NT. M$ saw fit to remove ntkernel.exe in the process. I upgraded to
Linux and have been much happier! :) Note, this was not WHFC's
fault. I will probably give it another go soon, as there are others in
the office that are not a MS phobic as I.

As for Kanji, that should not be a problem. The printer driver
actually takes care of generating the postscript. For some stuff I fax
from home, I just print to a file on a samba share, and then send it
from Linux. WHFC works the same way ( as I remember, its been quite a
while. )

Note that the PC printer driver generates kanji postscript fonts from
True Type fonts, and sends them the page. The only effect of this is
that generated PS can be larger, say 500k+ if you use a few fonts. I
only send 1 or two page docs, so it is likely that additional pages
would not incur such an overhead.

As for Hylafax supporting Kanji, that is another thing altogether. It
has been on my want-to-do-list for a long time. Ghostscript does
support kanji, and there are patches to get it to support True Type
kanji fonts directly. This works from sendfax, in that it will pass
the PS to GS, and GS will render the fonts correctly.

What does not work, is sending kanji text files directly. The code in
Hylafax is geared towards 7/8 bit characters. This also applies to the
cover page generation as well. I made a patch quite some time ago to
use an external kanji text to postscript formatter. Hylafax uses a
"magic" mechanism, like "file", to figure out the file type. It can
then call a PS formatter to convert the text. I think I can dig this
up if you are interested.

It will be a fair amount of work to get it to handle CJK properly. I'm
happy to supply more info if you want, and might ever finally take
this project on, it there is interest out there.

Regards,

	Andy