[hylafax-users] FW: AS400 FAXING

["Michael Alexander" <hylafax@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

You could also look into going PDF instead of tiff on the AS400 then on
hylafax could do the pdf to tiff/fax conversion.
PDF on the AS400 is pretty easy once you get the right tools, there are afew
out there.  I forget which we use, but it will convert a spoolfile to a PDF
document that we can then have e-mailed.  The PDF would allow you to pull
out information from it still since it is just specially formatted text, you
could likely pretty easily do that with awk or something like that, ftp the
pdf to the linux machine (or from the AS400) to find your documents to fax
and then process them.

We aren't doing that though so I couldn't help too much with that, we
started to research it, but then purchased an AS400 fax/e-mail solution
(FastFax).  Personally I think it is pretty junky, the faxes are very low
res, and the e-mails are just the low res fax image file converted to a pdf
and e-mailed, so it is even poorer quality.  But we needed a way to process
the Formsprint output to fax and e-mail and it does do the job, I know we
could have figured it out, but they wanted it rather quickly.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: hylafax-users-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:hylafax-users-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pedro Rocadas
> Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 7:56 AM
> To: hylafax-users@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [hylafax-users] AS400 FAXING
> 
> 
> --- andreas@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 04:21:48AM -0700, Pedro
> > Rocadas wrote:
> > > --- "Moschke, Mark" <mmoschke@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > I've managed to get the AS400 to spit out .tiff
> > > > files to my hylafax server
> > > > via APDS.
> > > 
> > > A brave effort but maybe useless, believe me, I
> > know
> > > ;-).
> > > 
> > > > I need to know how to go about "pulling"
> > > > the fax number from the
> > > > .tiff file and automatically sending the .tiff
> > file
> > > > to the intended
> > > > recipient.
> > > 
> > > Et voil?, you are stuck. Extracting text from a
> > tiff
> > > file it's possible but harder, only with OCR
> > software
> > > and you can imagine how expensive can be such
> > software
> > > for AS/400 and how poor results you can had using
> > it.
> > I think Mark meant how to decode the faxnumber as a
> > string
> > in the tiff file. tiffinfo should display that. But
> > then
> > the AS/400 must put the faxno in the .tiff in the
> > first
> > place.
> 
> I'm aware of what the AS/400 tiff tools can do. The
> one that I tried was developed by IBM but no support
> is provided and funny, the documentation is a bit
> obscure.
> 
> > 
> > Another solution, that works better (IMHO) than
> > expected is to print to
> > a postscript printer driver,
> 
> I'm not sure but I think that the printer drivers that
> came with the OS/400 are all PCL...
> 
> > and then one extract
> > the ascii text of the
> > fax via ps2ascii (or pstotext) and grep for the
> > faxnumber (and perhaps
> > other infos).
> 
> Tricky...and who knows how much garbage AS/400 include
> in the files...
> 
> > Another way would be to use an
> > email2fax gateway, ...
> 
> Have you worked with AS/400 before? :-)
> 
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