Faxing PCL and Postscript files

[John Wolfe_1]

Hello,

Does anyone know how to send PCL, Postscript, and ASCII text files to a fax modem from HPUX 11.0?

TIA,
John

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

One solution that I know works is Vsifax. Check out www.esker.com. There are some restrictions in that not all fonts will convert but if you stick to the fairly generous set of fonts then it works very well.

It will also handle postscript and ordinary text. In fact, if send a file ending in .pcl it will automatically format as PCL; likwise .ps will do postscript. There is also a mechanism to supply the desired conversion.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I suppose that I should mention 'Hylafax'. Search for it on the Web. You could download the source and have a try - and unlike Vsifax, it's free.

[Francisco J. Soler]

Hi John,
go to: http://hpux.connect.org.uk/

and search for hylafax, you will find some packages that allow you install a fax server and clients to your HPUX machine.

Frank.

[John Wolfe_1]

Thanks for the info. I looked at hylafax but it doesn't seem to handle PCL files. We really want a product with full support available so I am leaning towards vsifax. Can vsifax be configured to look just like a printer to the user or application? What modems will work with it?

Thanks,
John

[A. Clay Stephenson]

It's quite easy to integrate the Vsifax vfx command into the lp spooler. All it really needs is a custom interface file. The Vsifax documentation is pretty clear.
Vsifax is not too fussy about the type of modems. I use Multitech rack-mounted modems (MT2834BR's) because I hate clutter and very few things clutter up a data center more than modems. I had to modify one of the files that Vsifax uses to identify modems but that was very easy.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

One more thing, John:

You may need a daemon to hold the fax tty ports open. Check out this thread:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x6c7dabe92dabd5118ff10090279cd0f9,00.html

Regards, Clay