[hylafax-users] Two simple HylaFAX Questions

[Jeff St Louis <jeff.stlouis@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Everyone,

 

 

I have two more quick questions with regards to HylaFAX 4.4.3 on CentOS 5 with a MultiTech MT2834Zb modem.  As mentioned before, I’m new to hylafax and am currently in the process of replacing VSI-FAX version 5.1 with it.

 

The two questions stem from my experience working with the various versions of VSI-FAX:

 

 

1. Does HylaFAX support batch faxing in the same manner as VSI-FAX?  What I mean is, currently when I run a batch fax job from my character based accounting system, I send all jobs to one big file to be parsed by VSI-FAX based on embedded tags.  The file is parsed into many individual faxes and sent to all my different clients.   I just set my software to send the desired tags/parameters I need, and VSI-FAX takes care of the rest…

 

I currently have my own little batch processing BASH script I wrote to take care of all of this, because I didn’t seem to find what I was looking for online…  I found plenty about batch faxing the same document to multiple different numbers, however that was NOT what I was looking for…   All documents differ and are sent to all different numbers.

 

My BASH Script parses the files, strips the tags into a seperate file, converts the rest of the document (PCL) to Postscript (using GhostPCL from Artifex), reads the tags file for parameters, then sends each one individually using the sendfax command and the parameters specified in the tags file (eg…  subject, to number, from, recipient, etc…).  The biggest problem with this is that my script expects each parameter to be on a certain line in the tags file, and I can only use the parameters my script knows about…   Without having to rewrite this script to handle dynamic passing and reading of tags, I don’t know if there is anything out there in place to handle such a task.

 

 

2. And this brings me to my 2^nd question, does anyone know if HylaFax plans to support PCL to FAX conversions, now that Artiflex has released GhostPDL under the GPL as oppose to the old APL they had the previous releases under?  Is anyone currently working on such a feature?  Even Beta? 

 

I see Hylafax has a pcl2fax script in place within it’s hierarchy, however when you open it up, you end up coming to something that say it’s currently NOT supported…   I was possibly considering trying to tie in GhostPDL/PCL here somehow.  Has this been done before by anyone? 

 

The GhostPCL, pcl6 command has worked great for my PCL to Postscript/PDF conversions, but does NOT support direct conversion to FAX/TIFF Documents I believe.  I have some done some pretty fancy things using the pcl6 command embedded into shell or tcl scripts.

 

 

Thanks again,

 

 

Jeff St. Louis

Sr. Systems Administrator