Re: [hylafax-users] for those who wish to fax MS Word docs...

[Lee Howard <faxguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul, Paul, and Frank,

Thank you for your comments on this thread.

Remember that typerules is used with the sendfax client.  And, although 
sendfax can be used in a print-to-fax environment, these customers are not 
using it that way.  If they were using a print-to-fax environment then 
there would not be much problem to begin with, as in those environments 
the print driver can be modified to preformat the image to, say, 
PostScript (vector-drawn images are really a better format than 
pixel-drawn images to use when the server will be formatting the image 
itself before transmission).

So as for HylaFSP, it's not really an option because the users are not in 
a print-to-fax environment.  Furthermore, the users are not always on a 
Windows 2000/XP desktop.  The fax service is reached through an 
HTTP-driven web service - so one minute the user interface may be a 
Windows XP system (say, at work), then the next it will be their 
web-enabled Zaurus PDA (say, on the road), then the next it will be a Mac 
OS X laptop (say, at home).  Aside from having them install something on 
each platform (which would be difficult at best and would require a fair 
amount of user tech-support for the installation and maintenance of those 
installations).

As for OpenOffice, installing X and whatever else may be required to 
script-in soffice seems a bit burdensome.  Furthermore, I'm not 
confident that a straight-forward approach can be followed to use soffice 
the way that typerules requires (specifying the output file as %o).  I'm 
not against programming, but as I'm not thrilled by the idea of faxing 
Word docs in the first place (see below) if I were to conceivably do some 
programming it probably would be with improving antiword in whatever it 
may lack.

Although I'm not against suggesting to my clients that they purchase a 
license to some proprietary software (if there is any that would work on 
Linux) I believe that they will prefer to pay me to hack on antiword 
instead, even if I charge more (because long-term they feel they're 
better off).  In any case, antiword seems "good enough" for now.

Deep down, though, I'm not a big fan of handling Word docs directly, just 
like I'm not a big fan of handling HTML docs directly.  Word docs look 
slightly different based on whatever printer and print driver you happen 
to be using.  It's going to be almost impossible to guarantee proper 
pagination and formatting "identical" to what the creator's Word program 
displays on-screen because Word docs weren't really designed to be 
portable that way, like PDFs are.  And, this goes pretty much for any 
word processor filetype.  If the sender wants to guarantee that the 
formatting look as it does to them, then they must export the document to 
a format that can guarantee it.  PostScript, PDF, and TIFF all guarantee 
this.  Word and HTML cannot.  So, my using antiword here is just a couple 
steps better than using wvPS here, which is just a bit better (I suppose 
to these folks) than saying, "Well, it's better than nothing."

Thanks,

Lee.


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