Re: [hylafax-users] faxmail - tiff attachments problem

[Lee Howard <faxguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

nik600 wrote:

> i am trying to setup my hylafax server as an email2fax gateway.


> root@servercvs:/var/spool/hylafax# cat  /usr/local/lib/fax/hyla.conf
> MIMEConverters: /var/spool/hylafax/mimetype
>
> root@servercvs:/var/spool/hylafax# tree  mimetype/
> mimetype/
> |-- application
> |   |-- ordine.ps
> |   |-- pdf
> |   `-- ps
> `-- image
>    `-- tiff


> The fax is correctly generated and send, but the second page is empty.
> If i take a look in the docq the ps generated contains on the second
> page an images of 1x1 inches instead of the standard 11x8.5 


There's been some recent debate on this matter that you should be able 
to find in the mailing list archives.

Normally users think of mail-to-fax gatwaying as merely a way to use an 
e-mail agent as fax client.  They think that they get their faxes in 
their e-mail and they get notifications by email and so they should just 
be able to send faxes by email.  This is usually what is expected, and 
so most people think... okay I'll just send off an e-mail and attach the 
desired fax documents and it's over.

faxmail wasn't really designed with that intention.  faxmail was 
*really* more of a mail-to-postscript converter.  It was designed to 
reproduce an e-mail (with inline content, etc) in Postscript format.  
And so the attachments were generally interpreted as in-line, embedded 
things - meaning that the MIMEConverters were expected to produce some 
kind of Postscript snippit out of the attachment and then faxmail would 
use that snitppit and embed it into the rest of the Postscript that it 
was creating.

However, unless you're some kind of Postscript whiz producing Postscript 
snippts with the MIMEConverters is not really feasible.  Furthermore, it 
may truthfully be impossible to properly prepare the Postscript snippit 
in that the converter really doesn't know the internal Postscript state 
of the envelope.

So then come the workarounds, and if you search the archives for 
MIMEConverters and "showpage" you'll find a number of workarounds.  Some 
of them are more reliable than others, but the basic gist that they 
follow is that they insert a "showpage" (a Postscript end-of-page 
command) before the converted output is sent.  This gets you the proper 
page break that most people are expecting.  Some of the more zealous 
workarounds will also filter that converter output to remove the 
Postscript trailer to prevent the one that faxmail will create from 
becoming a duplicate.  This doesn't always work to the user's 
advantage.  If more postscript output will be following from faxmail 
(like other attachments) then stripping the converter's trailer may not 
really be appropriate... and at least in practice it is okay to leave it 
there.

In HylaFAX+ I've already got the PDF and TIFF converters there, and I've 
"fixed" faxmail "properly" to not have to mess with the "showpage" and 
trailer stuff.  You don't need a Postscript converter because faxmail 
can handle Postscript natively.  So my suggestion would be to try 
HylaFAX+ 5.0.4.  But the next idea would to simply:

 echo "showpage"

in your MIMEConverter before you run your poscript conversion command to 
stdout.

Lee.

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