Re: flexfax: more questions on WHFC (file transmission formats)

[Ulrich Eckhardt <Ulrich.Eckhardt@transcom.de>]

Steven A DuChene wrote:
> 
> In testing out the whfc client for Win95/NT with my working HylaFAX system
> I have some basic questions. It seems like from the results I have gotten
> so far, it only handles sending postscript files. Is this correct? I tried
> sending a text file and it never went anywhere.

Hi,

this is correct. HylaFAX can only handle tiffg3 and postscript (the
sendfax
command converts all incoming data to postscript, before sending it to
the server). WHFC simply sends all data direct to the HylaFAX server.

> If it does handle only sending postscript files, is there any easy way

There is never a easy way under Windows.

> (using OLE or something) to get various windows clients (Word, Excel,
> and etc) to send postscript to it for faxing? The only way I see now

No, there is no way. Even Microsoft has a lot of problems with their
own file formats. And they have a lot of people working on this problems
and they have got the sources. 

> is to print through a postscript print driver to a file and then go
> into whfc and pick that postscript file to send to the fax server. This
> seems really kludgy to me and there must be a better way because I don't
> want to have to deal with trying to clean up postscript files laying

My OLE calls have an option, that they remove the file after sending
it to the HylaFAX server.

> around on people harddrives after sending faxes let alone trying to explain
> how to do this to lots of users.

Seems, that you haven't worked very often with windows. Printing throug
a printer driver is the one and only way . I agree, it's really kludgy,
for
further info see http://www.transcom.de/whfc/writing.html , but it's
the windows way of doing anything what under unix can be done with a
pipe.

> 
> I read through the whfc client documentation and see the OLE calls it
> provides but they only handle transmission, not file conversion.
> I am a knowledgable Unix admin but not really that familiar with the
> functionality OLE and other Windows protocols provide to solve this sort
> of problem.

On the next page of the documentation, there are some examples. However,
OLE is the only way.

Uli
-- 
Ulrich Eckhardt                         Tr@nscom GbR 
http://people.frankfurt.netsurf.de/uli  http://www.transcom.de
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