I was intrigued by the original question and have done some
experiments on this G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.4.
Firstly I set the machine up so as to be able to send faxes from
applications using the Mac OS Print->PDF->Fax PDF… built in facility.
I have a broadband connection (ethernet modem) so it was necessary to
add a serial modem to dial up the remote fax machine's number. A USB
modem left over from the old internet dial-up days seemed promising.
There is on http://www.apple.com/support/ a very clear concise
document "Mac OS X 10.4: Adding a Bluetooth fax device". Although a
USB modem is not quite the same animal as a Bluetooth modem, the
recipe for the one works for the other. There is no point rehearsing
the 12 steps set out in that document here: anyone interested should
download the Apple document.
Having done this, Print->PDF->Fax PDF was found to work perfectly
with a number of applications, for instance BBEdit. This established
that the machine was capable of sending faxes. However it does not
settle the question of how to send faxes from within a Perl script.
If the document's application is scriptable a fax might be sent by an
AS to work the 'Print' facility, and that AS could be dispatched from
Perl. But that is by no means a good general solution to the problem.
However 'efax' does offer a more general solution. There are, I
think, various ways to call Unix from Perl. I have tended to write a
shell script for the Unix function, calling that from the Perl script
by 'tell application "Terminal" -- do script() -- end tell'. So the
first step was to get 'efax' working from the terminal.
By default 'efax' expects to find '/dev/cu.modem', which on this
machine does not exist. However 'ls /dev/' revealed (amongst a heap
of stuff) an entry 'cu.usbmodem08141'. Using this in place of the
default results in a command line:
efax -d /dev/cu.modem08141 -t [remote fax number] file.tif
That worked fine. (I am lucky that my ISP, demon, provides me with a
fax number for incoming faxes which it then e-mails to me, which I
can send faxes to myself for test purposes. Otherwise, I suppose, you
would need a local good friend with a fax machine in order to do the
experiments…)
The question then arose how to obtain a faxable version of the
document in question. This is most complex part of the problem simply
because of the huge number of possible document formats. In my own
small world I restrict the range to Postscript and PDF documents.
Postscript is useful because firstly one can very easily output '.ps'
files from Perl (for instance the perl script 'pod2ps' does this) and
secondly within Mac OS X every application can save its document as a
PDF file. Hence, On the whole, I need only deal with '.ps' and '.pdf'
files.
The question then arises as to how to convert these formats to G3
compressed '.tiff' files required by 'efax'. Now there is a companion
to 'efax' by the name of 'efix' which can do this but I must confess
so far I have been unable to make it work. However it appears that it
is effectively a front end for ghostscript, and therefore it seems to
me more sensible to use 'gs' directly. Even if one opts to use 'efix'
ghostscript must be installed. The mantra for converting a file to a
faxable format is:
gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=tiffg3 -dTextAlphabits=4 -
dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -sOutputFile=outfile infile
Obviously one has complete freedom of choice about the outfile name
and extension, but 'gs' determines the infile format from the infile
extension I believe. By this means '.ps', '.pdf', '.txt' and a whole
heap of graphics formats can be converted to fax format. Again, from
Perl a shell script can be invoked by a AppleScript call to the
Terminal.
As Bill Stephenson says below there is a front end for both 'efax'
and 'efix' going under the name 'fax'. The command 'fax make file'
will produce a fax format file with the same name as file with .001, .
002 etc. appended. It uses 'efix', which in turn uses 'gs'. I can see
no advantage in this. Indeed there are snags with 'fax': for instance
it expects a US letter page size and truncates an A4 postscript page.
There appears to be no way of controlling page size. Similarly the
commmand 'fax send file' fails because it uses 'efax' with all
default settings, including the default serial modem. There appears
to be no way of overriding the 'efax' defaults from 'fax'.
I have not tried (yet) the suggestion of piping a file to 'lpr' --
certainly the serial modem appears in 'lpinfo' -- so it might well
work. However I think everything you might want to do from within
Perl can be done quite simply by firstly using 'gs' to convert the
file to faxable format and sending the fax by 'efax'. In both cases a
suitable shell script can be invoked from within a perl script by an
AppleScript 'do script' command.
I hope this may be of interest to some with my apologies to those
>not< interested in faxing from Perl for his long spiel.
Alan Fry
On 18 Jan 2006, at 09:10, Robert Whittle wrote:
I managed to get perl to send faxes using the 'fax' front-end
program, but never satisfactorily. I had to use root user to send
faxes and I never managed to send any faxes that has graphics in
the. In the end I installed PageSender, which has examples of
sending faxes via AppleScript, and I called the AppleScript from
perl. I know that sounds a lot more round-about but it had a lot
of advantages for me. I could send HTML files, correctly formated,
and there is a record kept which you can view in the GUI of all
faxes send, or not.
If you do get something working, I'd be very interested to know
how you got it done
Robert Whittle
On 18 Jan 2006, at 08:29, Dominic Dunlop wrote:
On 2006–01–17, at 20:29, Bill Stephenson wrote:
Is there a way to fax a document using the built-in Mac OSX
(10.3) fax feature with perl?
Well, the command-line program underlying the facility is efax.
There's also a simplified front-end program, fax. You could try
calling either of those with system() or whatever. Alternatively,
CUPS makes the fax modem visible as a printer once it's configured
-- run lpinfo -v and you should see it listed. This means that
you should be able simply to pipe the stuff you want to fax to
lpr. The trick would be to work out what option you need to put on
the command line in order to get the number dialled, and
acceptable formats for the data. (Text is probably OK. Beyond
that, I've no idea.)
Not that I've tried either possibility myself.
I want to write a script that faxes selected members of congress
my humble opinions ;)
A laudable aim.
--
Dominic Dunlop
