Re: flexfax: Viewing received faxes via http browser

[Rob Newberry <rob@eats.com>]

> *OUCH*. What would be ideal is a reader (such as viewfax, which I use)
> to view the raw tiffg3 files (there is an OK demo one available for
> Win95, I believe called acdsee). Also workable is translating the
> tiffg3 into a set of multiple single page TIFF files for
> viewing. Doing tiffg3->Postscript->JPEG is just sucking down CPU and
> disk space and bandwidth in a *serious* kludge.
> 
> Hmm. Come to think of it: Does anyone have the scripting in place to
> modify faxrcvd to automagically generate TIFF files, one file/page of
> fax and appropriately numbered? This might be a good option for
> handling Web based FAX service....

It's not web-based, but I've done something similar.

I wrote a FAX viewer for the Mac -- it reads raw TIF G3 (heck, it uses
LIBTIFF -- thanks, Sam).  It's part of my MacFlex distribution, the
Macintosh client for HylaFAX.  Find out more at
http://www.eats.com/MacFlex.

Anyway, I've modified faxrcvd to automatically binhex the received TIFF
file and email it to my wife as an attachment.  They appear on her Mac
desktop, and she uses my viewer to look at them.

But I ALSO have the fax recvq shared via netatalk so my Macs can mount it
directly.  The faxrcvd script also sends me a message that a FAX has
arrived; when I want to, I just mount the FAX spool and view the FAXes
directly (again, using my viewer).

It should be possible to do something similar for Windows using SAMBA.
I've been working on a port of my Mac viewer to Windows (for fun mainly).

It's not web-based, but it certainly solves my needs pretty elgantly.

(the only thing cooler would be to automatically rename the files so that
I can tell who they are from -- or to use the HylaFAX protocol to access
them, rather than the file system).

Rob