Re: [hylafax-users] Can't sending doc file

[A J Stiles <hylafax_resp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 14 June 2006 08:08, flame code wrote:
> Hello
>
>  I'm using hylafax-4.2.5 and i have problem about sending .doc file:
>
>  [root@faxsrvr]# sendfax -d 2453 file.doc
>  file.doc: Can not determine file type
>
>  How to send .doc filetype? Is hylafax support for the .doc?

Hylafax only supports sending PostScript and PDF files.  .doc is a proprietary 
file format.  Microsoft have been extremely uncooperative, refusing to 
release the specifications of the file format.  The developers of competing 
word processors have done an amazing job using the "French Café" technique  
{named after the idea of learning to speak French by sitting in a café in 
Paris, listening to what people say and observing what happens}.

In a sane world it would be illegal to lock up file formats in this manner.  
Your saved data is effectively held to ransom, since nothing but Microsoft 
Word can render .doc files correctly.

Anyway, your options are:

(1) Open the .doc file in OpenOffice.org and export it as a PDF.
(2) If you're using KDE:  Open the .doc file in OpenOffice.org and "print" it 
to a PostScript file  {it's one of the standard special printer options}.  
But if your Hylafax is properly set up you should be able to "print" any 
document straight through Hylafax.
(3) If you're using Windows:  Install a generic PostScript printer driver 
which can be got from the Adobe web site, and configure it to print to a 
file.  Open the .doc file in Word and print it to a Postscript file.

If you use the Windows method, you might need to change the extension 
from .prn to .ps, but unix is generally smart enough to work out what a file 
is by looking at the first few bytes rather than relying on the extension.  
For instance, a Postscript file usually begins with %!PS-Adobe; and a shell 
script always begins with #!/bin/sh.  

There's actually a fourth option:
(4) Obtain the OpenOffice.org source code.  Rip out the .doc reading and 
PostScript printing bits.  Glue them back together to make a unix command 
line program which expects a .doc file on STDIN and spits a PostScript file 
to STDOUT.  {This is a non-trivial task and is included mainly for the sake 
of completeness.}

--
AJS

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