Re: Faxing
24 jan 2006 kl. 11.43 skrev Alan Fry: As a PS, [EMAIL PROTECTED] suggested to me [slightly condensed]:- Well, I'd skip the Perl - applescript - Terminal - bash hoopla why not just use system(efax command line) or just back-ticks. Indeed that's much better, faster, and cleaner, and works fine. how about using convert for producing the tiffs? I think there is a version included in Mac OS X, but since I tend to install imagemagick myself at some point I should not make any promises...
Re: Faxing
Thanks for the detailed and useful info provided. When using the efax approach described, is there any record available anywhere that tells you whether or not the fax was successfully sent or not? Options to retry if the number is busy ? thanks On 23 Jan 2006, at 12:09, Alan Fry wrote: 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
Re: Faxing
On 25 Jan 2006, at 10:32, Robert Whittle wrote: Thanks for the detailed and useful info provided. When using the efax approach described, is there any record available anywhere that tells you whether or not the fax was successfully sent or not? Options to retry if the number is busy ? There are return codes from 'efax' which tell you what transpired: 0 The fax was successfully sent or received. 1 The dialed number was busy or the modem device was in use. Try again later. 2 Something failed (e.g. file not found or disk full). Don’t retry. Check the session log for more details. 3 Modem protocol error. The program did not receive the expected response from the modem. The modem may not have been properly initialized, the correct -o options were not used, or a bug report may be in order. Check the session log for more details. 4 The modem is not responding. Operator attention is required. Check that the modem is turned on and connected to the correct port. 5 The program was terminated by a signal. I guess one would have to handle the return codes appropriately in the perl script. This, and much more information on the capabilities of 'efax' are all to be found in the 'man pages': type 'man efax' into the Terminal window. HTH
Re: Faxing
On 23 Jan 2006, at 17:34, Bill Stephenson wrote: On Jan 23, 2006, at 5:09 AM, Alan Fry wrote: I was intrigued by the original question and have done some experiments on this G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.4. snip Wow, thanks for sharing what you've learned! Admittedly, I haven't had much time to play with this since I asked that question but your reply puts me way ahead of where I was then. I'd also like to thank everyone else that replied. If I get my Fax the House script finished I'll post a copy of it. As a PS, [EMAIL PROTECTED] suggested to me [slightly condensed]:- Well, I'd skip the Perl - applescript - Terminal - bash hoopla why not just use system(efax command line) or just back-ticks. Indeed that's much better, faster, and cleaner, and works fine. Many thanks for your kind remarks. I look forward to seeing Fax the House in due course. Alan
Re: Faxing
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
Re: Faxing
On Jan 23, 2006, at 5:09 AM, Alan Fry wrote: I was intrigued by the original question and have done some experiments on this G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.4. snip Wow, thanks for sharing what you've learned! Admittedly, I haven't had much time to play with this since I asked that question but your reply puts me way ahead of where I was then. I'd also like to thank everyone else that replied. If I get my Fax the House script finished I'll post a copy of it. Kindest Regards, -- Bill Stephenson
Re: Faxing
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
Re: Faxing
On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, 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. Also, anything that supports AppleScript can be driven directly from Perl using Mac::Glue. -- ...while the Japanese are unable to duplicate the American film [market] they can destroy it by this video cassette recorder. - Jack Valenti, 1982
Re: Faxing
At 13:29 -0600 1/17/06, Bill Stephenson wrote: I want to write a script that faxes selected members of congress my humble opinions ;) You can send e-mail from perl and that leads to two options: 1) Send the email to efax (sp) where it can be converted to FAX and sent for a fee. 2) Don't vote for representatives who steadfastly refuse to publish an e-mail address. I know, they will need a clerk to read it but that's true for the FAX too. Joel Hefley; are you listening? -- -- Love your country. But don't trust its government. --
Re: Faxing
Hi Doug, I like the idea of efax. It seems good but costs $13/month. That is a little high for me considering I send or receive about 5 faxes a year. I wonder if there is another place that only charges when you do something? On Jan 18, 2006, at 11:51 AM, Doug McNutt wrote: At 13:29 -0600 1/17/06, Bill Stephenson wrote: I want to write a script that faxes selected members of congress my humble opinions ;) You can send e-mail from perl and that leads to two options: 1) Send the email to efax (sp) where it can be converted to FAX and sent for a fee. 2) Don't vote for representatives who steadfastly refuse to publish an e-mail address. I know, they will need a clerk to read it but that's true for the FAX too. Joel Hefley; are you listening. I was under the impression that all US representatives get an email address automatically assigned to them, whether they use it or not. -- Love your country. But don't trust its government. --
