Re: [hylafax-users] FW: AS400 FAXING

["Michael Alexander" <hylafax@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: hylafax-users-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:hylafax-users-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pedro Rocadas
> Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 10:45 AM
> To: Michael Alexander; hylafax-users@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [hylafax-users] FW: AS400 FAXING
> 
> 
> --- Michael Alexander <hylafax@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > You could also look into going PDF instead of tiff
> > on the AS400 then on
> > hylafax could do the pdf to tiff/fax conversion.
> > PDF on the AS400 is pretty easy once you get the
> > right tools, there are afew
> > out there.
> 
> Yes, there are tools for tiff, ps or pdf. Some are
> included in the OS others can be found "free" for
> download. But the problem is in how to extract the fax
> number. If you have the file ready to fax the best and
> elegant way, as I mentioned before, is using a client
> and the only that I believe that could work right now
> is the java client gnu-hylafax. I do some tests with
> it but I stopped with them because my boss wanted the
> fax server working for yesterday :-).
> 
> >  I forget which we use, but it will
> > convert a spoolfile to a PDF
> > document that we can then have e-mailed.  The PDF
> > would allow you to pull
> > out information from it still since it is just
> > specially formatted text, you
> > could likely pretty easily do that with awk or
> > something like that,
> 
> The regexp for a postscript or a pdf file are more
> complex than deploying one for plain text ;-).
> 
> 
> > ftp the
> > pdf to the linux machine (or from the AS400) to find
> > your documents to fax
> > and then process them.
> 
> HylaFAX protocol works similar to ftp and you can
> programm the AS/400 to use the ftp package included in
> the OS but I made some tests with it too and guess
> what, I quit :-).
> 
> > 
> > We aren't doing that though so I couldn't help too
> > much with that, we
> > started to research it, but then purchased an AS400
> > fax/e-mail solution
> > (FastFax).
> 
> Wasted money.

I agree on that, wasn't my decision to make though even though we did say it
wasn't needed.
 
> >  Personally I think it is pretty junky,
> > the faxes are very low
> > res, and the e-mails are just the low res fax image
> > file converted to a pdf
> > and e-mailed, so it is even poorer quality.
> 
> The good thing of printing the text to the linux box
> like I did/do, is that you use enscript to generate
> the final file to be sent. This tool is very powerfull
> and your control over the quality is high. And you
> solve the problem of poor quality in the emails
> because the document you just sent has good qaulity
> and the attach is in PDF too (I started using PS but
> after sending a fax that failled 2-3 times the quality
> was very bad).
> 
> >  But we
> > needed a way to process
> > the Formsprint output to fax and e-mail and it does
> > do the job, I know we
> > could have figured it out, but they wanted it rather
> > quickly.
> 
> I have this thing working more than year, you never
> read the howto?

I don't recall reading anything in the howto's about taking Formsprint PCL
output as input to hylafax.
In anycase, fastfax is already purchased and in active use and integrated
into the existing PO/Invoice software, so the project is closed.  (even
though the quality is poor)

We do have options on our spoolfile menus though to e-mail the prints as
either PDF, PDF with bookmarks, txt, or HTML.  And some custom options to
break apart sales reports to send to the salespersons by e-mail.

We are using hylafax as our main inbound fax line (currently only one modem,
but it rarely rolls over to the second number on plain fax) and afew use it
for outbound faxing.

-Mike


____________________ HylaFAX(tm) Users Mailing List _______________________
  To subscribe/unsubscribe, click http://lists.hylafax.org/cgi-bin/lsg2.cgi
 On UNIX: mail -s unsubscribe hylafax-users-request@xxxxxxxxxxx < /dev/null
  *To learn about commercial HylaFAX(tm) support, mail sales@xxxxxxxxxxxx*