Re: Merge of fax cover and content

[Steve Williams <steve@genie96.com>]

Hi,

I am running HylaFAX 4.0pl1 on a RS6000, running AIX 3.2.5.  I have
recently set up my system as a "Cell" on the TPC world wide email->free 
fax service.

In the "glue" programs that came with the TPC interface, there is something
that is similar to what has been discussed here.

There is a default cover page that is used.  As a TPC Cell operator, we
are entitled to use 1/3 of the cover page as advertising.  To enable this,
we simply have to generate an eps file and place it in a directory with a
certain name.

The perl programs pick up this eps file and attaches it to the fax cover 
page so that it appears on the bottom 1/3 of the page.

It has been designed so that different phone numbers can have different adds,
so this is all done on the fly, by putting together bits of postscript.

I must confess that I have not done this yet, as there is only 24 hours in 
the day.  However, I know that at least SOME of the TPC Cell's are taking 
advantage of this.

So, the groundwork is in place to do this, or at least a model that could be
used to accomplish what you want.

The URL to get to the TPC home page is:

http://www.tpc.int/

I hope this helps out a bit.

> 
> > Here is a question.  We are going to send out a large volumn of fax and
> > each fax is about half page long.  I would like to generate a small fax
> > cover and put this cover on top of the fax content.  I know even I put
> > them together, they will not exceed 1 page.  So, has anybody done this
> > before or did I miss something in the documentation?  ( This is
> > not the same as sending out a fax cover first and then the content page,
> > the difference is if I send the cover first, then the fax machine which
> > receive this fax will cut the small cover apart from the second page.
> > and they look very odd. )
> 
> I've always wanted something even more generic but was never able to
> convice Sam to do it and was too lazy to do it myself.  I wish faxcover
> had the ability to do EPS inclusion as a preprocessing step with
> a bit of meta-language to specify the size and filenames that might
> be pulled from the user's home directory.  My idea was to build a
> generic cover page with a standard text portion where the To:/From:
> etc. expand as they do now, but allow a custom logo depending on
> who was sending (we have several internal business units sharing
> the same networked equipment).  And creating a new cover would only
> require software that knows how to create an EPS file - you wouldn't
> have to muck around with the postscript afterwards.
> 
> In your scenario you would be able to create your fax content as an
> eps, then build a cover page that placed it the way you want.  Actually
> you could probably coax ghostscript into doing this for you if you
> know how to do postscript inclusions but it would be easier at a
> higher level.  I've seen a tool that does EPS positioning/scaling
> somewhere and it didn't look too complicated as long as the file
> had the required boundingbox entry.  Is anyone interested in adding
> this feature?
> 
> Les Mikesell
>   les@mcs.com
> 


-- 
	Steve Williams, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
	Genie Computer Systems Inc.
	steve@genie96.com