flexfax: RE: Hylafax Cover page / WHFC Ghostscript errors

["Abrahamsen, Ken" <KAbrahamsen@wrightgroup.com>]

Dear Henry,
My setup:
   Redhat 6.1 (Stock from CDROM)
   hylafax-4.1beta1-1rh6 (installed from RPM)

*NOT* being a postscript guru and after *much* experimenting with the
default cover page and WHFC, here's what I have concluded:
1. The problem you describe happens (at least) with WHFC 1.0.5, 1.0.6 and
1.1.0. I have tried them all. I have sent the WHFC author various emails RE:
this but have not yet received any responses (although he has responded to
other questions I've asked him).
2. To avoid maintaining 2 separate cover pages, I've *mangled* faxcover.ps
as included below. It is *very* ugly but works with both WHFC and sendfax
commands. Postscript purists will cringe with what I've done... My apologies
to them... But it works for us.
3. What I wil do soon is to make the 'Comments' section of the cover page a
smaller type point so the user's can put more words on the comment lines
without running out of room of the printed page. Users like to say a lot in
the comments.
ken abrahamsen
-----Original Message-----
From: Henry Yen <henry@AegisInfoSys.com> at Internet_TCO 
Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2000 9:03 PM
To: Abrahamsen, Ken; jheinze@schroedahl.de at internet_tco;
david@djwhome.demon.co.uk at internet_tco
Cc: flexfax@sgi.com at internet_tco
Subject: Hylafax Cover page / WHFC Ghostscript errors


Greetings.  I have been able to conclusively isolate (and fix, for myself)
the issue about the ghostscript "/typecheck in --search--" imaging error
on header pages sent with WHFC (1.0.5).

My setup:
   Redhat 6.0
   hylafax-4.1beta1-1rh6 (installed from RPM)
   ghostscript-5.50-3 (installed from RPM)
   ghostscript-fonts-5.50-1 (installed from RPM)

note: after installing the ghostscript rpm's i had to change the following
      line in etc/setup.cache from:
 
FONTPATH='/usr/share/ghostscript/5.10:/usr/share/fonts/default/ghostscript:
           /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1'
to:
  FONTPATH='/usr/share/fax/afm:/usr/share/ghostscript/5.50:
           /usr/share/fax/afm:/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1:
           /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts'

After much experimentation and comparison with previous hylafax/WHFC
setups that were all working well, it appears that the default
cover page installed with the hylafax rpm (/usr/share/fax/faxcover.ps)
contains (near the very end) this line:
  rule stringwidth pop 29 x y comments BreakIntoLines
Note that this is the default cover page used by the "sendfax" command
when run from the linux command line.

I copied the file to another location (a samba share for use with
WHFC Win98 desktops), and changed the above line to:
  comments rule stringwidth pop { x y M S /y y 29 sub def } BreakIntoLines
and that now works for faxes submitted via WHFC.

I'm not knowledgeable about postscript at all, but I did play around
with several scenarios, and frankly, I'm not quite sure exactly how/why
WHFC is managing to invoke ghostscript with the parameters in a
different order (I think that's ultimately the problem?), as everything
is supposed to go throuth the faxcover program anyhow?

Also, having to maintain 2 separate faxcover templates is a pain.

Please note that I haven't tried WHFC 1.0.6 (or 1.1.0), but from the
mailing list threads it looks like the same problem.

Let me know if this doesn't work for you; this whole issue is such
an interesting curiosity for me that I'm likely to go buy a couple
of postscript books soon!
-- 
Henry Yen                                       Aegis Information Systems,
Inc.
Senior Systems Programmer                       Hicksville, New York

faxcover.ps