Re: [hylafax-users] Email to fax (2)

["Michael Stowe" <mstowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For my own edification, is there a reason that people use email to fax
instead of submitting postscript to Hylafax?  I feel that I'm missing
something.

For the record, I also don't understand why somebody would send a FAX
through a web page.

It seems like email-to-fax or web-to-fax is a lot more steps for the end
user than print-to-fax...

> Ok....
> Now I see that I'm not allone in the dark....
>
> ...
>
> An Intrepid HylaFax User wrote:
>
>>>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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>>
>>
>>
>


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