Re: flexfax: Re: format files

[Nico Garcia <raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu>]

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On Fri, 22 Aug 1997, Bill Campbell wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 22, 1997 at 10:01:54PM +0800, Super-User wrote:
> ...
> >does anyone know of ANY way to convert microsoft word documents for fax in
> >an automated way?  has anyone even heard rumors of a unix ms-word
> >viewer/converter?  if it must be done through windows, does the
> >word-viewer microsoft gives away accept command-line options to simply
> >print a file on command line (to a captured postscript virtual printer)?
> >in this case i imagine you could get away with sharing a directory via
> >samba, and calling a batch file through hummingbird's inetd (part of
> >exceed for nt)..
> >anyone??
> 
> We do this via a Unix printer accessed via SAMBA on the Unix box.  As far
> as M$-Word is concerned, it's just a PostScript printer.  We have a SYSV
> type printer interface script that extracts the fax number from the
> PostScript using ps2ascii (after stripping the M$ garbage memory tests :-).
> The fax number is simply a pattern ``Fax: phone_number'' where phone_number
> is a pattern that looks like a telephone number.  Once it has the phone
> number it sends that via sendfax with the cleaned up PostScript file as
> input.

Sigh. This only works if you have a local machine with Microsoft Word
on it to print from, connected to your Samba and HylaFAX server. This
misses out on the entire point of the original question, whether it is
possible to *convert* Word documents to fax without doing it from
inside Microsoft Word as a separate operation.

The way you are doing it is *useful*. But a more general MS Word ->
Postscript utility for UNIX systems would be better.

			Nico Garcia
			Engineer, CIRL 
			Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
			raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu

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