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I'd like to create a new cover template page as I would prefer for our faxes to *not* go out with the Silicon Graphics logo. :)
Does anyone have experience doing this? Can someone point me toward the proper instructions? I've read the faxcover man page, which tells me how to use an alternative template, but I can't figure out how to create one.
Here's what you do:
I used FrameMaker to make ours, complete with company logo, and had FrameMaker output a postscript file. I suppose you could even use troff and use a troff-to-postscript converter if you like. The key part is to get a postscript file that looks as you like, and has sample text in each of the fields to be filled in by the program, each sample text of which is unique to each field so you can find each one buried in the postscript later on.
This is the hard-to-explain part. Let me preface it with a quick intro into postscript text drawing. Each text string is enclosed in parenthesis, and either in front or after the text string on the same line is a macro and a set of coordinates detailing where to "draw" the text on the page. In addition, some packages, like FrameMaker, will sometimes break a string into two or more separate strings in the postscript document, for no reason that I can find. For instance, the phrase "Now is the time for all good men to come to the..." might all be on one line, not broken, in whatever utility you use to generate the postscript, etc, but your output postscript file may "draw" it in three sections, and even out of order, e.g.:
OK, so you need to find the sample text you put in to mark the location of the fields. This is best explained by example. For instance, in my template page straight from FrameMaker after I combined any broken strings, I have the following lines (which happen to be in order):
If you will notice in my sample postscript exerpt above, you can identify the sample strings I put in to determine the exact coordinates of where I wanted the fields to be. Those sample strings are "to-name" (on the third line), "to-company" (on the fifth line), etc...
Now, what you want to do is to convert each sample text line to the format expected by the faxcover EPSI wrapper. This involves changing, in my case, the format of:
I submitted the following to the FAQ maintainer. In short, with Frame4.0, the instructions were enough to get me started, but were not the whole answer. So... the FAQ needs updating... but I'm prefixing my question with a helpful hints in hopes of encouraging someone to be similarly helpful.
From the instructions in the FAQ, I was not able to modify the postscript output of either Word or Corel (which are what the current fax cover pages at our company are done with). I finally caved in and created a duplicate of our cover page with Frame. After much tearing out-of-hair, I figured out that the line inserted by faxcover that is '100 dict begin' is too small for the frame output. Changing it to 200 dict begin makes it work.
I did this with emacs on the binary (since I havn't been able to get hylafax to compile on our SGI with either gcc 2-7-2 or the SGI provided CC). I also had to modify the windows client since it seems to do it's own cover sheet and also puts in the '100 dict begin'
With that modification, Framemaker 4.0 cover sheets can be made to print. However, the /M /S AND /IS macros are all defined and used by the Framemaker postscript. I fixed them by changing them to /MY /MS and /MIS (no particular reason). Note that /S is used by /MIS (in the {}'s) and must be changed there.
I uploaded a new version (1.03) of latex-cover to ftp.sgi.com. This version contains a small bug-fix over the previous one. People who have no trouble running 1.02 need not get this version. The bug was in the template file lcover.tex . This file contained a command \today that should have been \todaysdate instead. Thats all! For people who do not know about latex-cover: --------------------------------------------- latex-cover.sty offers a way to create custom coverpage templates for use with the faxcover application from the hylafax distribution. The advantage of latex-cover.sty for creating a coverpage template compared with the possibility of changing the original faxcover.ps template file is that latex-cover.sty allows the design of the coverpage to be made in latex(2e). On the other hand the file faxcover.ps contains pure postscript making it rather difficult for a user to design a new coverpage template. Using latex-cover.sty in conjunction with latex and dvips the user can now write a plain latex file and insert commands defined in latex-cover.sty at those places where he wants to insert parameters actually filled in by faxcover when a fax is beeing send. The latex source can be comiled by latex and converted to the Postscript template file via dvips. Thats all! Rainer --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rainer Krienke krienke@informatik.uni-koblenz.de Universitaet Koblenz, http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke
I didn't see an easy template for creating a fax cover sheet and
trying to program in postscript really didn't appeal to me.
So, I created a tgif template file (faxcover-template.obj)
which makes creating a cover page easy.
To create a cover page.
0) Get the make_faxcover script
....
1) Get tgif (I used 3.0 patchlevel 10)
(see http://bourbon.cs.columbia.edu:8001/tgif)
2) Download the tgif template obj file
(submitted to: ftp://ftp.sgi.com/sgi/fax/contrib/covers/faxcover-template.obj)
3) "Open" the above file in tgif and replace our logos with your own
or move stuff around. It is important that each text variable
field be unique.
4) Print to file as eps. It will automatically be named faxcover-template.eps
5) #make_faxcover faxcover-template.eps > faxcover.ps
(or to whatever the FAXCOVER variable is set)
6) Replace your old cover-sheet template with the one you created in step 5
My thanks to the creators of HylaFAX, tgif, and make_faxcover who
made this possible.
Afan Ottenheimer
http://www.jeonet.com
afan@www.jeonet.com
On Tue, 8 Oct 1996, Eric Poole wrote:
> Well, I've looked throughout all the documentation I can find including the
> man pages and the online web-based docs, and I can't find it anywhere ...
Hmm. I used to remember a FAQ entry somewhere detailing just how do this..
> How do I generate cover pages, i.e. how do I make one that replaces the
> default one with the Silicon Graphics logo?
If you just want to remove the logo, you'll have to change the
faxcover postscript file. It's located in /usr/local/lib/fax/faxcover.ps.
Before making any changes, I'd make a copy of it first. You don't really
have to know Postscript to make these changes (I don't), but if you've
done any programming you can make reasonable guesses.
Look for "drawlogo". There'll be 2 instances of it. One is the function
definition, the other the invocation. You can remove the function:
/drawlogo {
...
} def
and the invocation
drawlogo
If you want to put in your Company name, look in the function /drawtext
and make an educated guess.. (It ain't too hard)
> I've managed to get as far as to generate a postscript file and use it as a
> cover sheet, but if I do that it won't insert the standard cover sheet info
> such as To:, Fax Number:, Company:, From:, # Pages:, etc.
If you look further down the default faxcover file, you'll see entry points
for putting in external info. These are:
/to
/to-fax-number
/to-company
/from
/regarding
/todays-date
/page-count
If you've made your own cover page, you'll have to edit the resultant
Postscript file and put these entry points in. My guess is that you'll
have to put in something of the form:
nnn mmm M /to-fax-number IS
where "nnn" and "mmm" are movement parameters.
--
Jonathan Chen e-mail : jonc@pinnacle.co.nz
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