Usenet 1994 October/usenetsourcesnewsgroupsinfomagicoctober1994disk2.iso/unix/volume24/faxpax/part04/Readme

Text File | 1991-03-12 | 7KB | 140 lines

This  is   faxpak   [Copyright   (C)   1991   klaus   schallhorn,
[e-mail]]

faxpak currently runs on Suns only - not because it uses any spe-
cial  SunOs features, but because I don't have access to anything
else. I developed faxpak mainly on a 4/60, then  moved  it  to  a
3/60 that does all our spooling.

Apart from [temporary] hardware and  typeface  restrictions  [see
below]  faxpak is quite flexible. It allows faxes to be sent from
any networked machine. It allows aliases and distribution  lists.
Entries  in  such  lists needing a special "for the attention of"
string are forked out as separate jobs.  If you have more than  1
fax  modem,  faxpak  automatically  shares the load between these
modems. This includes splitting of batches to distribution  lists
into several queues.

faxpak enforces permissions. You can set faxpak up to send  local
faxes  any  time, long distance ones and international ones to be
sent at cheap rates only. You can enforce the sending of faxes to
any  given  phone  number at fixed times. And you can permit some
users to override these time restrictions.

faxpak was created when the post office  increased  our  contract
postage rates to an almost insane level. We therefore decided [as
a small publishing house] to  deliver  our  newsletter  by  other
means.  We  now  deliver  by mail(1) to subscribers' mailboxes at
various online and video text systems, we allow direct modem con-
nection to mbox [our 3/60] and we fax our newsletter.

faxpak is used for oneoff faxes [and only if I can't email],  and
has  been  used  three  times  [we  publish every other week] for
batches of ~150 faxes @ five pages each to our  subscriber  list.
Batches of this size take a good two nights to send out, although
the pure transmission time is just under 12 hours  [the  rest  is
engaged  phone lines, repeats because transmission errors, logins
sneaking in on the faxmodems, etc].

faxpak currently supports touchbase's 2496 fax modem  and  others
that  use  or emulate the sierra type fax chipset, such as zoom's
mx 2400s. Early december I found someone willing  and  supposedly
able  to ship a beta class2 modem. Unfortunately it seems to have
been sent by bicycle.  It's supposed to be here "real soon now".

For this reason faxpak does [not yet] support other  modems,  nor
does it allow incoming faxes.

Because of the peculiarities of the modems we use  faxpak  is  by
far   not   what  I  wanted.  It  now  works,  but  incorporating
postscript, TeX or other files has been delayed.

Porting  faxpak  to  other  platforms  should  be  easy.  Writing
wiring.c  was  supposed  to  be  easy  as well. Provided you have
hardware flow control, it will be easy, however. I have not  been
able  to  use XON/XOFF flow ctl under SunOs, although initial and
parallel development under msdos showed xonoff to work  there.  I
don't  know  why it doesn't under SunOs. There's some interesting
reference to a change to STREAMS and xon/xoff flow ctl  in  SunOs
4.1  in  the  user  manual for a CoALM Sbus card I just received.
I've done printer drivers and a terminal emulator using xonoff in
the  past  and  using SunOs, though, so I assume the modem has to
take a large part of any blame.

Just to show you how "strange" the sierra type modems  are,  con-
sider  incoming faxes: you have to check [for each incoming byte]
whether carrier is high or low in order  to  distinguish  whether
the  byte  received  is  fax data or some command or confirmation
from the modem.

Similar problems were encountered with sending faxes.  You  first
talk  to  the  fax modem @ 2400 baud, change to 19200, then dial,
and wait either for an XON [if using xonoff] or  for  CTS  to  go
high,  before  you  [in the case of xon/xoff enable flow ctl and]
start squirting data. Between pages you turn  off  flow  control,
only to re-enable it for the next page. Weird.

You could, of course, write a special  device  driver  to  handle
this  [but  then you could have hardware dependencies in any pro-
gram], or you could take a black box approach, as  some  vendors'
tech  reps  seemed  to  slip: using a pc type mother board with a
large buffer and a fax card built on top.

If you look at wiring.c you'll find that I  left  some  stubs  in
there  for using xonoff. Please don't tell me "xonoff flow ctl is
easy, it's done in such and such a way" unless you get it to work
with a sierra type modem. I found that the modem dropped the line
when I was using xonoff, or that the  remote  fax  machine  timed
out. Both not very useful.


As far as I know touchbase's 2496 does not yet come officially as
a  sierra type modem, although I bought their programmer's kit in
Nov '90.  This kit [about $100 on top of the  modem  price],  for
which  you have to sign a non disclosure agreement, consists of a
[ccitt implementing] t.30 prom, a document virtually identical to
the    "writefax.man"   document   posted   by   Nick   Pemberton
[[e-mail]] in message [e-mail] on Dec  8th  '90  in
alt.fax  and  other groups and a reprint of the t.4 file compres-
sion specs. Nick told me that he  downloaded  the  document  from
Zoom's  bulletin  board.  I enclose Nick's answer, in case you're
interested in that bbs.

I decided to base faxpak on the publicly available  document.   I
have  ignored  as  non existent features offered by the touchbase
2496 but not mentioned in the public document. If I  ever  wanted
to be tied down, I wouldn't use a modem.

Apart from that, zooms fax modem is supposed to be selling at $99
[Direct  Micro,  1-800-288-2887  or  614-771-8771],  which is, as
mathemagical minded fellow administraters will observe,  somewhat
less  than  the price for the touchbase upgrade alone. JDR Micro-
devices sells a 4800 baud fax modem for about $120. You're  bound
to find quite a few more by investing in a copy of Byte.

The difficulties in getting faxpak to work reliably are the  rea-
son  why  faxpak's  output  is limited. Being more concerned with
getting output at all the next stage  obviously  is  getting  the
output  nicer.  faxpak  currently supports only its default fonts
[they're enclosed compressed && uuencoded], and hp laserjet  type
fonts  [max  30 points], which are scaled to size on the fly [and
they're not pretty at low resolution].

Over the next few weeks I plan to improve on this, and I plan  to
clean  up spool.fax.c, which has become somewhat incomprehensible
by the last minute addition of the "ftao" string feature  [origi-
nally  I  assumed  someone  claiming fax receive capability would
have his own fax machine].

faxpak includes source, FaxConfig [which builds char  set  depen-
dent   font  sets  for  high  and  low  resolution,  faxconfig.h,
fax.config, Makefile, and fax.1].

Because cnix was down for 6 days I'm going to finish this off  by
just  adding  a  file Howto.Install.  fax.8 pages will be done at
some time in the future - but then, a lot of things will be.

Enjoy.

klaus