Re: [hylafax-users] Quick questions...

["Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com>]

On Wednesday, August 16, 2000, at 7:27:16 PM, John Oliver wrote:
>> These, of course, only narrow things down to who's *sending* the fax,
>> not who they're sending it to.  I seem to remember someone working on
>> a thing called T.30 subaddressing, but I don't know that that would
>> help you... and the only other customary solution to this is to use
>> DID -- direct inward dialling -- each user gets a 'fax number'; they
>> all point to the same modem bank.  So far as I know, though, there's
>> not yet a good way to do that, either.

> Hmmm... actually, while not a preferable solution, we might go that
> way.  Of course, as we add employees, that's not a good way to go.  But
> I suppose only assigning fax #s to those who really *need* them and let
> everyone else share a single general box might do the trick...

> I asked this because, a couple of years ago when I was working with a
> Windows-based (and very expensive!) Copia FaxFacts server, they offered
> a third-party solution that was supposed to actually parse fields on the
> cover sheet to determine delivery.  If I can remember who that was,
> maybe I can look up their site and see if they have anything new... :-)

Indeed.  There's supposed to be an OCR project out there in the ether,
but I'm not sure where.  I'll look around; you're not the first to
ask.

There's also some work underway to deal with DID, at least, if you can
afford a T-1 to bring the lines in.  More When I Know More.  :-)

>> The *right* way to do this is to receive the fax, then OCR scan it to
>> pull an addressee out of it.  Unfortunately, Unix-based, much less
>> *free*, implementations of OCR are few and far between.

> Would these be "automagic"?

If you could find an OCR package, you could, yes, wire it into the
process to autodispatch.

>> > B) Be able to send faxes from applications... ie. "print to fax" or
>> > something similar.  Something that installs as a printer driver under
>> > Windows and something else that would give a similar ability under UNIX.
>> 
>> This is a walk-on. The HylaFAX home page has links to print-driver
>> solutions for various versions of Windows and the Mac; as well as for
>> interactive Unix/X printing. If you're in a non-interactive Unix
>> environment, the trick is getting address info out to the client
>> program; how easy this is depends on what you're printing from.

> I'm not sure of what you mean by "interactive" vs. "non-interactive".

If your app is running on an X workstation, there are ways to have it
pop up a dialog to get the addressee info, just like it's implemented
on Windows and the Mac.

If it's a terminal connection, or a background app, you'd have to
implement a printer driver (an lpr filter, or an lp interface) that
could lift that stuff out of the body of the document, OR have your
application supply those things on the command line of the fax sending
application, which usually requires modifying both the app, and the
user behavior, and is therefore often harder to do.

But none of those things are specific to HylaFAX; they're all
inherent in the problem domain.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     
The Suncoast Freenet
Tampa Bay, Florida     http://baylink.pitas.com                +1 727 804 5015




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