Re: flexfax: HylaFAX with Macs, CGI or MacFlex?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu>]

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On Thu, 9 Dec 1999, David Rouse wrote:

> I've been investigating using HylaFAX in a Macintosh-based newspaper 
> environment. We do a lot of ad design work that has to be faxed out for 
> approvals and I think that HF would make things easier on the staff. I'm 
> working with 4.1b2 now -- and it does work, thanks for the encouragement 
> to keep at it.
> 
> However I seem to be having some problems with MacFlex and HylaFAX. The 
> spooled TIFF permissions are set in such a way that they can't be 
> converted to faxes (the 'Could not reopen converted document to verify 
> format' error). Plus the old protocol seems to have problems of its own.

Hmm. Which "spooled TIFF" files do you mean? The received MacFlex jobs
on the HylaFAX server?

> I haven't started downloading all the CGIs, but I think that a CGI that 
> allowed file uploads would work very well for us. I guess what I want is 
> to allow a staff member to fill in the telephone number and cover sheet 
> notes on an HTML form, then from the same form select a gif or jpg of an 
> ad to be faxed (does HF do PDFs?). Do any of the current gateways do 
> this?

Not currently. HylaFAX only knows about tiffg3 and other TIFF formats,
Postscript, and text, in that order. This is partly why it's so much
easier to just accept print jobs, and deal with the postscript.

A PDF->Postscript translator seems feasible: the ghostscript
on your HylaFAX server should already have such a tool.

GIF->TIFF tools also exist, and should already be in place as part of
your previous TIFF installations. Sorting out what type of file it is
for the CGI tools may be a bit of an adventure, and I don't recommend
it for the faint of scripting...

> Otherwise, if anyone is using HylaFAX in a Mac environment and has any 
> helpful tips, please send them my way. And if anyone needs help getting 
> HF running on Solaris 2.5.1, I think I've hit every pothole and gotten 
> through it.

Cool! Perhaps you can take a look at the Solaris installation notes at
www.hylafax.org and see if you can recommend updates.

			Nico Kadel-Garcia
			Senior Engineer, CIRL 
			Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
			raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu

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