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

[Aristedes Maniatis <ari@ish.com.au>]

I too have Hylafax running with Mac clients. I have spoken several times to
the author of MacFlex - he seems very busy and unlikely to make significant
improvements in the immediate future, but he is still committed to updates.

The key advantage of faxing from the desktop should be the ease of use.
MacFlex doesn't support heirachical address books (LDAP would be great!),
but it is simple to use.

Unfortunately you may has discovered that it doesn't work from Illustrator,
Quark and Photoshop. This really kills it for us.



We had thought about an alternative: postscript. Simply use the Laserwriter
8 driver and 'print' the pages to a lpr queue on the server. That part is
easy. Then we would need to write some scripts (possibly web based) that
would allow a user to enter the fax number and cover page so that the fax
can be sent.

It all seems reasonable, but a lot of work. The advantage here over your pdf
method is that you don't need Acrobat print drivers and there is one less
step in uploading the files. But I don't know what other problems it might
cause.


Then I had another thought - the MacOS uses PPD files to give particular
printers specific options (paper size, colour enhancement, etc.). I wonder
whether such a field can be generated which allows a text input (ie. a fax
number). A popup for choice of cover page should not be difficult. This
eliminates any post-processing of the fax - it all happens in one postscript
print dialog.

Does anyone here have experience with writing Mac printer drivers? Or even
some pointers as to where we might find more docs?

David, please keep us informed about any progress you make. I for one am
very interested.

Cheers
Ari



on 10/12/99 1:30 am, David Rouse at drouse@arlington.newsargus.com 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.
> 
> 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?
> 
> 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.



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