Re: flexfax: fax2pdf ...

[Peter Stamfest <peter.stamfest@eunet.at>]

On 21 Apr 2000, Dmitry Bely wrote:

> Peter Stamfest <peter.stamfest@eunet.at> writes:
> 
> > Just in case somebody is interested:
> > 
> > After searching the web and not finding a fast, cheap and small (direct)
> > fax2pdf conversion utility I sat down yesterday and wrote one.
> 
> Why fax2ps and ps2pdf (from Ghostscript 6.0 bundle) are not suitable for you?

To slow, and it didn't always work reliably (I do not know why, and if the
reason why something fails is not accessible to me, I'll rather not use it
in a customer environment).

The second point is, that the ghostscript I use (The GNU version) didn't
compress the PDF. So I obtained HUGE PDF files from small faxes. Sending
a 25 page fax as a 25MB PDF by E-mail didn't seem like a good idea.

The third thing to mention was that although I am a big fan of UNIX style
pipe programming, I thought that the concept of using a postscript
interpreter to format a graphic file is not something I like. 

I played around with this for a couple of days, and every "solution" I
came up with didn't do all the things I wanted: fast, small PDF output,
not resource intensive. This would allow to stuff the whole fax server
into a cheap PC with just 32MB of RAM, a slow CPU, together with a web
interface and integration of the whole thing into the email system.

peter