Samba and Fax

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Sep 19, 1997 at 07:10:36PM +0200, Graham Leggett wrote:
>Bill Campbell wrote:
>
>> No maintenance on win95???  It's a full-time job recovering from their
>> crashes and data loss.
>
>Precisely - as a result one less application to install every time we
>redo a win95 box makes a huge difference.
....
>> We have a Unix ``printer'' that extracts the fax number from the body of
>> the document (either text or PostScript), and forwards it via the HylaFax
>> sendfax program.  This looks just like a printer to all M$ software as well
>> as anybody else who can get to the printer on the Unix system(s).
>
>Does this need any intelligence on the part of the user? ie does the
>user just fill in the "send fax" wizard from O(ro)ffice 97 and send it
>off, or do they have to insert special lines into their document?

I originally wrote this using the M$-Word for Windows fax template.  The
user puts in the phone number, and all that stuff on the cover sheet, and
my printer interface script was originally written to extract the phone
number by looking for a pattern ``Fax: phoneno'' (it's written in perl so
it's a regular expression match).  It wouldn't be difficult to extend this
to handle aliases, and fax lists, but I haven't had any need for that -- yet.

We use similar methods to fax directly from web browsers.  In fact, much of
our in-house office automation can be done directly from any browser that
understands forms (we still use Mosaic for a lot of this).  The user can
search through a database for any pattern, select who they want to send
something to, select letter, fax, mailing label, etc., add text as
necessary, and send.  The only thing that runs on the M$ machine is the
browser.  Everything else runs on one or another of our Unix boxes.

Bill
--
INTERNET:  bill at Celestial.COM   Bill Campbell; Celestial Systems, Inc.
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                                -- Galileo Galilei