Re: [hylafax-users] Email to fax (2)

[An Intrepid HylaFax User <hylafax@xxxxxxxxx>]

> My question is how do I manage with html emails? or jpegs? or??? I know
> it has someging to do with MIME...
> Does anyone know howto?

Oh, there is a GREAT deal of misery, patching, more misery, and work ahead 
of you yet.

The documentation hints at setting mime translaters that you place 
into /usr/local/sbin/faxmail -- that part is pretty easy.

This is just the *START* of your task.

It took me over 12 hours to get PDF files working (as attachments), with 
the showpage() stuff to work properly with and without a text-body portion, 
so I wouldn't get "blank pages" or "squashed first page-of-PDFs", etc, 
*AND* to co-exist with "auto cover page".  I took the approach of showpage()
ing after the cover page and body-text (textfmt) part of the emails, since 
PDF files tend to be "full-page" affairs, and don't like to share the 
already-limited bitmap space with the email's body text.  You have to patch 
the source (or use CPU expensive awk/sed scripts to count showpages()s and 
trim the duplicate one.

Unfortunately, time was not something I had a great deal of, so my changes 
got more and more chaotic and desperate.  Faxmail was probably never 
designed to do this, but it strikes me as such a logical extension of its 
functions, it's hard for me to justify a complete rewrite.

What a pain!

Oh yes, I found that not all pdf2ps translators are created equally.  The 
one that comes with Ghostscript generates Postscript which does not "play 
nicely" with HylaFAX.  I use the "pdftops" tool which comes with xpdf - 
that does a flawless job for the purposes of piping it to sendfax.

In a later posting, I'll *TRY* to summarise the patching, cajoling, 
begging, and ritual sacrificing that it took to get it working.  My patches 
will probably be laughed at and rejected by the HylaFAX team with hot 
cannibal forks.

TIFF, GIF, and JPEG is much easier (there are numerous XX-to-ps tools which 
will do the job), but you have another problem lurking with this: do you 
print each one on its own page?  What "default" resolution do you specify 
for GIF and JPEG (which have no format support for an encoded resolution)?  
There are many subtle blackholes-of-time awaiting you with these formats.

And just when you think THAT is fun enough, my next tasks are to on-the-fly 
image M$ ExHELL and Turd (Word) documents... lovely.  I am planning on 
using a vmWare environment running Lose2000Pro w/Office2000Sp3 to print 
these nasty files to Postscript, which will be targeted to a shared SMB 
volume the faxServer uses to pick up the resulting PS to be attached to the 
faxjob.  

None of the Open Source tools I've tried can reliably image even M$ Word 
files with all of the various graphics and formatting bits intact.  EXHELL 
seems far beyond any tool's grasp.

WISH ME LUCK!

Sometimes I wonder whether or not it'd just be easier to run Symantec 
LoseFax Pro... and then I realise what I'm thinking.

Yours in Hell,

=Rob=


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