[hylafax-users] faxmail and MIMEConverters: blank page before every PDF attachment

[HSL GmbH - Lukas Ratajski <l.ratajski@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

currently we use HylaFAX 6.0.4 on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The MTA is Postfix, hooked up to MIMEDefang.

The goal is to send e-mails with PDF attachments, disregarding any HTML parts (caused for example by mail sent from Outlook).

There are MIMEConverters employed for the conversion of Unicode plain text to PostScript. We use PAPS to accomplish this task.

The converter file for text/plain consists of a single line:
 paps --font "Monospace 10" $1
...and this works fine for a normal e-mail WITHOUT attachments. Of course we disregard the typerules file, since the only document feed is e-mail that is processed by faxmail.

The current situation is that a mixed (multipart/alternative) e-mail _without_ attachments is stripped from the HTML part by MIMEDefang, and faxmail processes this mail without any problems. The result is a single, clean page of faxed plain text, with all Unicode characters displayed correctly. The same applies of course for normal plain-text only mails. No problems at all.

However, if there is a single (or more) files attached to the e-mail, faxmail inserts a blank page before the beginning of the PDF attachment. We dug very very deep into the internals of HylaFAX and even poked around in the source code of faxmail, to no avail. We checked out several recipes published on the web, including some "showpage" hacks and piping through perl scripts - which resulted either in

* raw PostScript being faxed to the receiver

or

* illegal PostScript being generated, resulting in aborted jobs.

Our current (and apparently the only possible) approach is the single MIMEConverter described above. Its only drawback is the blank page before the attachment, and we have no idea how to fix this. Without the MIMEConverter faxmail processes the mail correctly, with no blank page between the body and the attachment, but in this case Unicode characters are not displayed correctly. It seems that the blank page is only inserted when the external MIME converter is called. Since we rely on Unicode, there is no other way to solve this task for us. The PDF attachment is of course processed internally. No extra mime converter is used for this.

We're willing to cooperate and provide more details if needed.

Yours sincerely,
Lukas Ratajski

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