OFFTOPIC Re: flexfax: Re: your mail

[Matthias Reich <rei@hagos.de>]

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

Hi Nico, 

this one is absolutely brilliant and supherb.

thanx for that !!!
/Matthias
> 
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> On Mon, 11 Oct 1999, Roger Dickey wrote:
> 
> > I am trying to fax MS Word documents through HylaFax but I get a: "Can not
> > determine file type" error. Is there any way to format Office documents or a
> > way to disable file checking?
> 
> Oh, my. MS Word format is the result of inbreeding cousins so severely
> that they no longer share any genetic code with anything else. Like a
> coelocanth dragged from the depths, they can't just be put in the same
> tank with anything else but require their own special, pressurized
> environment.
> 
> Unless you fry 'em, with a little butter and maybe a lemon wedge: then
> they fit in the fridge just fine. In this case, that means outputting
> the contents of the MS Word document as a Postscript file by using
> Micro$oft's print drivers on the PC where you wrote the document and
> sending that to HylaFAX with WHFC or some other tool on the UNIX side.
> 
> Note: this is entirely Micro$oft's fault. They have designed a
> proprietary, undocumented and eternally evolving standard that they
> deliberately alter *AND LIE TO OTHER DEVELOPERS ABOUT* just to break
> other software that tries to interpret them. Examples abound: new MS
> Word documents cannot be handled by old tools, secret fields of data
> for tracking authorship of documents by the MAC address of their
> computers are now added, and just don't get me going about this: it
> won't be pretty, and that bit about fish in the fridge left me hungry.
> 
> Note also that HylaFAX can only directly handle three formats of
> document: TIFF (which it translages into a specific form for faxes,
> tiffg3), Postscript (which it translates to TIFF using ghostscript),
> or text (which it turns to Postscript using textfmt). Anything else
> has to be turned into one of those to be handled.
> 
> If you're really stuck with MS Word documents, you might try using
> "catdoc" or "mswordview", which can translate most of MS Word
> documents to raw text or even HTML for easier handling. But
> they're not perfect. Look at this web site for pointers on the
> somewhat superior "mswordview".
> 
>         http://www.gnu.org/~caolan/docs/MSWordView.html
> 
>                         Nico Kadel-Garcia
>                         Senior Engineer, CIRL
>                         Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
>                         raoul@cirl.meei.harvard.edu
> 
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