My question is how do I manage with html emails? or jpegs? or??? I know
it has someging to do with MIME...
Does anyone know howto?
Oh, there is a GREAT deal of misery, patching, more misery, and work ahead
of you yet.
The documentation hints at setting mime translaters that you place
into /usr/local/sbin/faxmail -- that part is pretty easy.
This is just the *START* of your task.
It took me over 12 hours to get PDF files working (as attachments), with
the showpage() stuff to work properly with and without a text-body portion,
so I wouldn't get "blank pages" or "squashed first page-of-PDFs", etc,
*AND* to co-exist with "auto cover page". I took the approach of showpage()
ing after the cover page and body-text (textfmt) part of the emails, since
PDF files tend to be "full-page" affairs, and don't like to share the
already-limited bitmap space with the email's body text. You have to patch
the source (or use CPU expensive awk/sed scripts to count showpages()s and
trim the duplicate one.
Unfortunately, time was not something I had a great deal of, so my changes
got more and more chaotic and desperate. Faxmail was probably never
designed to do this, but it strikes me as such a logical extension of its
functions, it's hard for me to justify a complete rewrite.
What a pain!
Oh yes, I found that not all pdf2ps translators are created equally. The
one that comes with Ghostscript generates Postscript which does not "play
nicely" with HylaFAX. I use the "pdftops" tool which comes with xpdf -
that does a flawless job for the purposes of piping it to sendfax.
In a later posting, I'll *TRY* to summarise the patching, cajoling,
begging, and ritual sacrificing that it took to get it working. My patches
will probably be laughed at and rejected by the HylaFAX team with hot
cannibal forks.
TIFF, GIF, and JPEG is much easier (there are numerous XX-to-ps tools which
will do the job), but you have another problem lurking with this: do you
print each one on its own page? What "default" resolution do you specify
for GIF and JPEG (which have no format support for an encoded resolution)?
There are many subtle blackholes-of-time awaiting you with these formats.
And just when you think THAT is fun enough, my next tasks are to on-the-fly
image M$ ExHELL and Turd (Word) documents... lovely. I am planning on
using a vmWare environment running Lose2000Pro w/Office2000Sp3 to print
these nasty files to Postscript, which will be targeted to a shared SMB
volume the faxServer uses to pick up the resulting PS to be attached to the
faxjob.
None of the Open Source tools I've tried can reliably image even M$ Word
files with all of the various graphics and formatting bits intact. EXHELL
seems far beyond any tool's grasp.
WISH ME LUCK!
Sometimes I wonder whether or not it'd just be easier to run Symantec
LoseFax Pro... and then I realise what I'm thinking.
Yours in Hell,
=Rob=
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