Re: HylaFAX and further development

["Andrew S. Howell" <andy@tibco.com>]

On Mon, Jul 21, 1997 at 09:19:09AM +0900, Andrew S. Howell wrote:
>>>>> "Jonathan" == Jonathan Chen <jonc@pinnacle.co.nz> writes:


    Jonathan> Yo.  One thing I've noticed about the list lately is
    Jonathan> that we appear to running slightly out of
    Jonathan> steam. Development on HylaFAX (fixes and more
    Jonathan> importantly enhancements) have basically ground to a
    Jonathan> halt (either that, or I'm not on the development list).

Jonathan,

	I'm doing a bit of development on HylaFAX. I'm adding support
for Japanese. At this point, I have GS 5.01 working in Japanese. This
means I can send Jananese postscript via sendfax. There are at least
two areas that need to be addressed though:

	Automatic text file conversion
	Faxmail

The first problem revolves around Typerules, which as you probably
know, is used by the sendfax command to map file types to conversion
commands. This file, like /etc/magic, does not cope with multibyte
encodings very well. It allows one to determine the file type for
binary data a specific locations within the file, search for a string,
or finally, detect if a given file is ASCII. This last mechanism is how
I plan to support asian character encodings. I'll add more predicates,
like "ascii", which test to see if a file matches a particular
encoding. Right now, I'm thinking of adding:

	euc	Extended Unix Code
	jis	JIS encoding
	sjis	shift JIS encoding

I have a script called a2ps that will convert EUC, Shift-JIS and JIS
encoded documents to Japanese postscript. Having added the above to
typerules, I can then make a rule says:

0       euc     x               ps      a2ps -p -nw -nh -ns -nt >%o <%i  

Thus, if the file meets euc encoding rules, a2ps ( Japanese version! )
will generate the postscript for me. It could be argued that textfmt
should be modified support this, but that is more work than I want to
take on, and a2ps does the conversion fine. This method should be
extensable, allowing others to add new predicates to detect other
encodings.

Faxmail is more problematic. It needs to understand Japanese embedded
in mail headers, as well as how to handle ios-2022-jp mime
messages. This is a much more difficult problem, since faxmail
generates postscript directly. Once I get typerules fixed, I'll start
on this. I hope to have typerules done in a week or so, after which,
I'll start on faxmail.

Please, if anyone has opions about this, let me know.

Andy