We at EverythingLinux receive faxes using Hylafax and until recently used
to automatically print them on the laser printer. Now we're storing them
in an incoming directory on our terminal server as TIF files. This has
lead to a slight problem with some staff not coping with it, and part of
that is just people being used to seeing them on paper and part is not
having a solution that really covers everything we need to do.
We're OK at this stage with the concept of manually routing faxes to
relevant areas. IE we only have one fax number and we're not doing OCR,
although we could use the fax ID strings people sometimes set in their
machines.
So far I've narrowed my application suite for dealing with faxes down to 3
applications, one in-house one that basically moves the fax file to an
attachment directory for a given order in the system so we can view the
faxes to do with an order by viewing the order in our system. The other
two things are Nautilus/eog and Qfaxreader (called from in-house app as
viewer).
Nautilius (the file manager in Gnome) is a great graphical file manager
and latest versions even show preview images of the faxes, once a fax is
selected to view (eog) I haven't found a way to view anything other than
the first page and it would be nice to see all the other fax attributes.
Later versions thankfully allow rotation too. EOG also has a fantastic
interactive zoom facility with the mouse scroll wheel - try with any image
- very impressive. It's disadvantage is all these bells whistles make
it quite a big app and load time too long to call as a quick fax viewer. I
should also check on bug reports.
Qfaxreader is a pretty cool fax viewer, shows all the fax attributes, has
sensible rotate buttons, can print although it can't seem to make sense of
our printer queues and therefore can't select which printer to print to
(thankfully prints to default printer). It's light weight fast to load
but I need to be able to move faxes from one directory to another which it
doesen't do. I'll be filing a bug report or two on it.
Does anyone have any suggestions on either file managers that do faxes
well or fax viewers that do file management ok (copy, move, delete, send
to email, print) - perhaps some perl/python/php libraries to read
display fax TIF files (or I can convert to PDF). I was reluctant, but will
consider web based stuff - must be able to do rotate zoom though and I
feel a web interface isn't good for that.
I might start exploring php script options (without using a web server)
if I can find the time.
I guess the next logical step is to be able to edit re-send faxes -
looking at xfax (about 2 years since last work done on it). EG please sign
fax back.
--
---GRiP---
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Grant Parnell - senior consultant
EverythingLinux services - the consultant's backup tech support.
Web: http://www.everythinglinux.com.au/support.php
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Phone 02 8756 3522 to book service or discuss your needs.
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