Re: flexfax: postscript attachments show up at 5% size

[Ben Parker <ben@dha.unon.org>]

This a familiar problem. I have battled with faxmail for some time so that
my e-mail-> fax gateway can handle attachments and I can tell you:

It's possible to send attachments through faxmail but you have to put in a
couple of scripts for each mime type (ie image/gif). One to convert (ie
GIF to PS), and one to massage the resulting output to compensate for
faxmail trying to squash the image in 1/20 th original size in the bottom
left corner.  Sending PS files is ironically the hardest battle. I have
discovered a silly workaroud. If you attach the PS file twice you get a
thumbnail on Page 1 and a full size version on Page 2. Pretty punishing on
transmit time, though.

I guess the following from faxmail(1) might be the clue to sorting this
out and starting each part of a multipart message on a new page. Can
anyone PLEASE suggest what Postscript command would work here (would
"showpage"  do it?)

DigestDivider     string       -                    multipart/digest divider POSTSCRIPT command

Cheers,

Ben
Nairobi
 


On Thu, 16 Oct 1997, Super-User wrote:

> 
> hi, i'm playing with attaching postscript files and sending them through
> hylafax.  when i do this, the header and body of the email come through
> just fine, then i see some tiny thumbnail of the image that is supposed to
> be the postscript page, in the bottom left corner of the first page.
> i've tried saving the mail (with ps attachment) and running it through
> faxmail (faxmail < ~/mail/sent-mail > output.ps) then using ghostscript or
> solaris's pageview to view the output.  the postscript file i attached
> appears in the bottom left corner, very very small (words become 1 or 2
> pixels high).
> i've played around with editing output.ps, and i see a line
> ".05 dup scale".  changing the .05 to .9 or 1 makes the attached
> postscript file full page, and bumps the email header off.
> changing it to 0.52 shows that it moves the header up, and gets cut in
> half.
> 
> how are postscript attachments normally done?  is my postscript file
> formatted to begin at the top of the page or what?  how can i have a
> postscript attachment immediately following the header on the page?
> 
> also on examining the output i see two "showpage" and "end restore", this
> results in an extra empty page.  (this comes up when there's an
> attachment)..  any easy way to disable this?
> 
> thanks
>