We just noticed that two of our fax machines (not fax modems connected to computers) don't like receiving blank pages, and I was wondering if anyone else had noticed this or had some explanation.
To: hylafax-users@hylafax.org Subject: bad EOP response to blank page Cc: richard@aoi.ultranet.com Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 22:42:56 EDT From: Glenn BurkhardtWe just noticed that two of our fax machines (not fax modems connected to computers) don't like receiving blank pages, and I was wondering if anyone else had noticed this or had some explanation. One of our users tried to send a text file that had a dozen or so blank lines at the end, and when it was paginated for transmission, the second page was completely blank. The fax transmissions using hylafax-v4.0beta018, with SunOS 4.1.4, and Zoom Telephonics or MultiTech ZDX modems failed, after sending both pages. The system continued to retry until the MAXTRIES limit was reached, resulting in several copies at the receiving end. I tried sending a text file with 8 blank lines, and the logs are attached. If it turned out that fax machines in general reject blank pages, "textfmt" could of course be easily changed to remove them. <..log deleted...> I uncovered this behaviour after v4.0beta018 got made. What is happening is that the page chopping code is removing all the trailing white space in the page. I've made changes to insure that blank pages always have sufficient space to hold a tag line that might be imaged across the top. This also keeps fax machines happy by sending something rather than no encoded data followed by RTC. If you want an immediate workaround you can disable page chopping. This fix will appear in the next distribution which will go out just as soon as I can finish the documentation (I'm overhauling the HTML docs in preparation for the v4.0 release). Sam