Re: [hylafax-users] faxcover coverpages, Was: **ANNOUNCE** Second release candidate of 4.3.1 now available

[Lee Howard <faxguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe wrote:

> Does anyone know if there will ever be anything in the
> works for (a more simple) template based cover page.  I myself find
> the ps cover page very difficult to deal with.


Over the years I've spent a good deal of time investigating this issue.  
So permit me to respond to this question, if you will.

First, realize that the scope of the matter involves only coverpages 
made by the faxcover program - so that primarily is going to be 
HylaFAX's sendfax client.  Other clients have utilized the same approach 
as sendfax/faxcover, but their coverpage is actually produced 
independently.  After all, the cover page is a document that is 
communicated by the client to the server.  Currently the server does not 
itself produce coverpages.

I do not disagree that coverpage template creation is cumbersome.  I 
would like to see a better way, and that is why I've spent so much time 
looking into it.

The Achilles heel in any alternative solution to the current faxcover 
template is how commonly available the creation process has got to be.  
Yes, faxcover runs only on most variants of UNIX, but the template 
itself not only needs to be usable and produceable on those UNIXes, but 
also produceable on Windows or whatever other kind of operating system a 
user will choose to use for running the coverpage template creation 
application (almost always in a GUI).

There really isn't any "standard" as far as creating printable forms 
goes.  Adobe has a good approach in its PDF forms, but to create them 
you need to buy a copy of Acrobat.  And then to "fill" the form 
afterwards you have to use Adobe's own toolkit or Reader.  Last time I 
checked Ghostscript and PDFlib did not support PDF forms at all.  
Alternatively, Microsoft has a good thing in its "Cover Page Editor" 
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/227195), but last time I checked the 
resulting ".cpe" file was of a proprietary format - nothing that could 
be filled and completed on a UNIX box, and certainly operating systems 
other than Windows aren't going to be able to create the CPE form in the 
first place.

So hopefully you can see that, although there are some potential avenues 
for investigation in this area, right now it doesn't appear that there 
is any good alternative to the PostScript form that faxcover currently 
uses.  You can create a PostScript document on nearly any operating 
system with nearly any word processor or publishing program, and you can 
edit the resulting PostScript document (to change it into a 
form/template) with any text editor.

Yeah it's a bit cumbersome.  Yeah reading PostScript is not particularly 
intuitive.  Yeah there are problematic variants of PostScript.  However, 
right now - other than writing our own cross-platform GUI coverpage 
creation program - it seems to be the best approach.

Lee.

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