On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 10:17 PM, Todd And Margo Chester
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 09/30/2011 10:00 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 10:39 PM, Todd And Margo Chester
>> <[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi Guys,
>>>
>>> Anyone have a favorite Hylafax client?
>>>
>>> I have been using J-Hyla-FAX.  It works okay.  I wish I did not
>>> have to convert everything over to Post Script before fax'ing.
>>> I presume printing directly to HylaFAX is out of the question.
>>>
>>> Many thanks,
>>> -T
>>
>> Hi! Oh, you asked a good question, and I happened to write the SunOS
>> port of that *years* ago,
>
> uh oh!
>>
>>  and contributed to the "upstream vendor"
>> compatible Linux ports. Working with its author, Sam Lefler, was a
>> privilege. Scary bright man, invented TIFF, one of the authors of BSD.
>
> Scary is the button to open a file in the send dialog being called "save".
> Was that your doing?  Had to open a throw away file to make sure nothing
> unthinkable happened.  Still freaks me out.  (I did report it.)

No, no, I did a lot of integration work with SunOs and Linux. Getting
communication consistently and reliably established with serial ports
tended to be a lot harder back then, since different tools had
different idas about how to handle incoming and outgoing serial
connections, and some even used different devices for incoming and
outgoing. (Seriously crazymaking stuff.)

HylaFAX actually helped clean up a lot of that, by consistently
maintaining the modems in a predictable, well defined state. It made
my life a lot easier, and I really loved it for complex modem setups
for both fax and data.

>> The answer is that you have to get the target phone number into the
>> system *somehow*. Your print queue would have to obtain the
>> information from somewhere: that's why the Windows "print queue" based
>> tools, like the PDF printers, pop a little window to ask questions.
>
> Do you know of any Linux Hyla FAX clients that will do this?

The enterprise version (which I've not personally used) is allegedly
quite good. There have lots of guis, some Jaa (which I think would be
silly for this), but there have been plenty of lightweight ones like
"hylapex" at sourceforge. I believe that the commercial "efax" service
is HylaFAX based.

I don't use it much these days: few environments have standard phone
lines anymore, and the serial port is no longer accessible on a lot of
hosts. The last time I used it was to find out if the serial port on a
motherboard was ruined, or merely confused by software.The
"faxaddmodem" tool is a great probe of serial ports and lot more
effective than trying to get minicom or kermit running.

>>  So
>> a GUI that does what you want should be feasible. Hylafax, and the
>> discussion lists, are hosted at Sourceforge: go aks over there and
>> tell them i said "hi".
>>
>> Also, unless your setup is odd, Postscript or tiffg3 conversion an
>> handle dozens of file types, is automated, relies on ghostscript, and
>> is managed by the "typerules". Has it been a problem for you? If so,
>> let us know or mention it to the HylaFAX groups.
>>
> The reason I wrote this group and not the Hyla FAX group is that Scientific
> Linux (old-out-of-date), is out of date on purpose.  The latest, greatest
> does
> not always work.  That is why I wanted this group's input.
>
> If no one writes me over here, I will eventually post over there.
>
> Thank you for your work on  J-Hyla-FAX: it is a sweet utility.

Oh, I just did integration. Sam Leffler, one of the authors of BSD,
wrote most of it. Give Sam the credit on that, and the current
maintainer Lee Howard and his colleagues over at Sourceforge.

> Thank you for the tips too,
> -T
>