Re: [hylafax-users] hylafax future plans?

[Lee Howard <faxguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michele Petrazzo - Unipex srl wrote:
> > 4. better/easy way to create cover pages and *archive* them with faxes
>
> +1!

The biggest difficulty here has been finding the *better* way.  Here are 
the alternative ways that I've investigated...

1) Making the cover page template be a "PDF Form".  The most-severe 
problem here was that at the time I investigated it there weren't any 
free PDF Form generators.  Then there is the issue of likely needing to 
add a dependency to a PDF library (such as PDFlib) which at the time I 
investigated weren't capable of "filling" the PDF Form.  I investigated 
the possibility of scripting-in acroread to do the form-filling, but at 
the time it was only capable of doing it with an FDF file, and it was 
messy.  These days acroread seems to require X to run (or a complicated 
frame-buffer workaround).  So I wrote this off as simply too complicated.

2) Support Microsoft's Cover Page Editor to develop cover pages (CPD or 
CPE files).  I couldn't find any documentation on the file format... and 
I simply cringed too much at the thought.  Furthermore, not everyone has 
this available to them, and it probably would get us into the same 
trouble as we're already in.

3) PCL forms.  My understanding is that PCL supports a kind of form ... 
or something.  But I'm not sure this is any different than Postscript 
forms like we're doing now.

4) HTML forms.  Since HTML varies from display to display... this seemed 
a risky approach depending on how the HTML-to-Postscript converter 
handled things.  I wasn't sure we really wanted to get that dependent on 
html2ps (although... I'm sure it's gotten better over the years)... AND 
furthermore, the client could script-in this feature quite easily.

In the end, the vast majority of this is a client issue (server-side 
cover page generation is possible, but rarely used).  So as far as 
HylaFAX is concerned, we're basically talking about sendfax (and maybe 
faxmail).  If a user is scripting-in sendfax they can certainly script 
together whatever concoction of Ghostscript, html2ps, acroread, etc. 
that they find best.  Thus, the target market for such a feature is very 
much limited to sendfax users who are either unable or unwilling to 
script together their cover-page generator of choice.

This is basically why I didn't pursue it any more than this.

Thanks,

Lee.







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