Re: tlug: html to postscript converter.

["Andrew S. Howell" <andy@example.com>]

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tlug note from "Andrew S. Howell" <andy@example.com>
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>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Oda <craig@example.com> writes:


    Craig> Andy, I'm doing almost exactly the same thing you are
    Craig> doing.  Through discussions with the author of html2ps I
    Craig> got him to add table support and Japanese.  I'm not sure if
    Craig> the new version is publicly available or not yet.  I think
    Craig> the guys name was Jan.  He seemed pretty nice.  I have
    Craig> additional info if you want it.

    Craig> What I have is a centralized document server with the HTML
    Craig> documents on it.  I then suck it in on the fly, generate a
    Craig> cover page through a form (using HTML for variable font
    Craig> sizes), filter it through html2ps, filter it through
    Craig> GhostScript to get it into fax format, then call up efax2
    Craig> to send it through the modem.  I think that hylafax is
    Craig> probably better, but I had efax2 on my computer and it
    Craig> handled Japanese, so I just used efax2.

Sounds like the ticket. This will make life easier!

    Craig> One thing that I can't do is spool the outgoing faxes.
    Craig> What I want to do is have anyone in the office click on the
    Craig> faxMe button and get an immediate verification that the fax
    Craig> is spooled, then set automatic retries on the spooled
    Craig> outgoing faxes, when the automatic retry limit is exceeded,
    Craig> I want the person to receive an e-mail that the fax failed.

Hylafax is what you want as far as the queuing goes. It handles
multiple lines, retries, email on success and/or failure etc. The one
thing I'm not sure about it Japanese support. I have been doing
everything in Word, which generates postscript fonts ( or bit maps,
I'm not sure) on the fly. So straight GS is fine. 

There is also a package to let PC users print to "fax". The Hylafax
server uses a ftp type protocol, so you can telnet to it and issue
commands to it. The idea is to make it easy to interface to other
programs. 

Hylafax has a email gateway that I use quite a bit at work. At home, I
have been trying to get pine working so I can play with various
things, such as IMAP and Japanese Mail, but it seems to need DNS, so
I'm off on yet another tangent, setting up DNS. 

Hylafax does not, as it stands, handle iso2022jp mail messages. This
is something I want to fix, but first I needed to be able to send
Japanese mail to myself. I suppose I should just try a mule emacs mail
package. For work, I use MH mail, which I plan to change over to mew,
soon after the 2.0 comes out, any-day-now.

Sorry, I'm rambling on. To many late night diaper changes!

    Craig> Right now stdout is going to the browser, so they get a
    Craig> bunch of tedious messages on screen as the fax is going
    Craig> out.

    Craig> Also, the GhostScript I'm using doesn't seem to be that
    Craig> robust with long Japanese documents.

I just moved to to GS 5.0, but have not tried it with Japananese
yet...

Andy
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