Re: [hylafax-users] Native PCL faxing?!

[Lee Howard <faxguy@howardsilvan.com>]

On 2003.04.17 11:27 Nicholas Bernstein wrote:
> Am I reading this correctly? If this is what it seems to be, and I can
> fax documents as native PCL ... well, I"m going to be /PSYCHED/ we
> generate documents as native PCL and normally have to convert them to
> tiff, which when doing lots of faxing takes up a decent amount of
> processor.
> 
> <snip http://www.hylafax.org/troubleshooting.html>

Originally HylaFAX was designed to also handle PCL.  However, at the 
time there were no free and good PCL-to-TIFF converters out there like 
Ghostscript is for PostScript.  These days I think there's a package 
called GhostPCL which works, but hasn't been "integrated" into HylaFAX 
like Ghostscript has.  It could be done, and probably without a huge 
undertaking.

HOWEVER, regardless of the document format, virtually all fax 
communication uses TIFF G3 or G4 encoding.  So, whether the client-side 
application does the converting or whether the server-side application 
does the converting, it still has to be converted.  Generally speaking, 
submission in a format such as PostScript to the HylaFAX server allows 
for better document clarity... but not necessarily.

In EXTREMELY rare circumstances (Microsoft Fax is one of them) 
documents can be sent with the "BF" (File Transfer) and/or NSF 
(non-standard functions) protocol in T.30... which, depending on the 
application, would allow other filetypes to be sent (i.e., ASCII text, 
PostScript, and possibly PCL).  HylaFAX doesn't support BF or NSF 
(other than decoding the frames).

Lee.

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