On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 6:27 PM, Todd And Margo Chester <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
On 06/16/2012 07:24 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
It really sounds like you want a better fax *client*.

Exactly.  If you missed that in my original question, I am going
to have to seriously work on my technical writing.  :'(
 
It was unclear. Replacing the back end with a CUPS based fax service buys you nothing in terms of a better client, unless it just happens to have one built in.

 
Hop over to the HylaFAX mailing list for help with that.

That would be

http://www.hylafax.org/content/Desktop_Client_Software

Have it bookmarked.  "fax4CUPS" is over there and it is
useless.  "Print to fax" is a dead link.  "VMFP" seems
interesting, but there web site does not have a manual
posted.  (Or one I can find.  That practice is so, so annoying!)
 
 
Well, Sam Leffler wasn't writing GUI's back then. He was writing a good back end service. The command line client "sendfax" works well, and you can wrap that with procedures, GUI's, webforms, etc.  
 
Yeah, there's a lot of quick and dirty one-off toosl out there. I handed off "WHFC" to my Windows users, a web form for UNIX users, and a shell script to ask for necessary information for UNIX users. That was enough when I worked with it.

And if you think replacing it with CUPS would make it better...

At this point, as long as it works.  I want to print to
fax.  Not, print to PDF (what Hylafax now supports PDF?
and when did it actually start working?), import to evince,
export to post script, import to fax client, yada, yada,
yada...

 

The PDF support became available (not necessarily enabled by default)....... 10 years ago now? It has to be compiled into the ghostscript back end, which didn't used to be standard but has been for some time.  

Look up Eric Raymond's essay, "The Luxury of Ignorance".

At the moment I am so butt faced busy I can not see straight.
If you would be of a mind, would you make a quick few lines
as to what you wanted me to see?

Thank you for the input,
-T

The first two lines convey its essence well:

> I've just gone through the experience of trying to configure CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. It has proved a textbook lesson in why nontechnical people run screaming from Unix.

Eric wrote some guidelines at the end for open source GUI's, and added some as a postscript that I'd sent him.