AW: flexfax: Hylafax and Word with telephonnumbers?

[Christoph Stotz <pif@logo.de>]

Hello !

We had a similar Problem. We are submitting large numbers of jobs per
day using MS Word for the generation. For logistical and performace
reasons we
found another way:

You have:

Microsoft Word
a TIFF-Printer-Drive which generates the right format
Hylafax installed and running
a shared directory on the Hylafax-machine

Now you print from word every single faxdocument to a file using a
VBA-Macro
The same macro generates a file called "job.fg" containing something
like this:

#!/bin/sh
sendfax <your options> -d '<numer2call>' <filename>
sendfax <your options> -d '<numer2call>' <filename>
sendfax <your options> -d '<numer2call>' <filename>
...

After you have generated you outgoing faxes, you can do a chmod 755 and
start the job.fg on the 
shell. This works pretty good for more than 6000 faxes/day !

This will work also for 1 fax, but it´s a littlebit complicated.

Using this method you have the following advantages:

+ Capability to resume after Windoze crashes (this never happens ;-)
+ Generate on multiple machines at the same time
+ Capability to resend faxes which could not be delivered (the tiffs are
still there!)
+ look to the tiffs in order to control generation errors from MS Word
(this too never happens!-)

- large amount of disk space is required 
- executing the job.fq must be done by hand or crontab
- maintenance of the files (deleting tiffs&job.fq´s)
- hylafax get´s slower with every fax you submit to the queue (that does
matter if you want to send
more than 1000...)

So, maybe this is a intresting implementation method for you. We had no
good experiences using
the postscript output. But we are still looking for a printer driver
which generates low resolution
faxes at a good quality.

If you want more information contact me directly, much of the things are
offtopic (VBA-programming ...).

Best Regards,

Christoph Stotz
logo: GmbH

PS: 70000 faxes delivered since today ;-)

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Ulrich Eckhardt [mailto:Ulrich.Eckhardt@transcom.de]
Gesendet am: Mittwoch, 28. Oktober 1998 09:00
An: Andre Vaupel
Cc: flexfax@sgi.com
Betreff: Re: flexfax: Hylafax and Word with telephonnumbers?

Andre Vaupel wrote:
> 
> Hello!
> I must implement a project, where 1000 faxes per day are dispatched.
The documents are present only in a Word format. These are copied by NFS
into
> a directory. The telephone number is detected from there automatically
by the current software. The telephone number is on the Word document
with a certain contraction.
> 
> My question:
> 
> Is it possible to give to Hylafax the faxes as Word document which is
extracted and dispatched the telephone number?
> Or however, it is to be linked on file base possible the document with
the appropriate telephone number?
> 
> The faxes can be printed also as Postscript into a file. The telephone
number (without WHFC (WHFC is greatly however not in the form required))
with the document must be transferred only
> automatically.
> 
> Thank you for your information!
> 
> Andre

Hi,

there is currently no good software around, which can
convert MS-Word documents to another format. So you
have to do the conversion on your Windows Box.

However, you can write a Word Macro, Visual Basic or
perl script, which uses WHFC to send all your faxes 
correctly to the HylaFAX server via OLE calls. See 
the OLE pages of the  
WHFC doku http://www.transcom.de/whfc/doku/ole.html
for infos and examples.

Uli

PS : Your lines are longer than 80 characters
-- 
Ulrich Eckhardt                         Tr@nscom GbR 
http://people.frankfurt.netsurf.de/uli  http://www.transcom.de
                                        Lagerstraße 11-15 A8
                                        64807 Dieburg Germany