Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!emory!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!pyrnj!esquire!yost
From: yost@DPW.COM (David A. Yost)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm
Subject: BackFAX problems
Message-ID: <2759@esquire.dpw.com>
Date: 30 Oct 90 02:19:00 GMT
Organization: DP&W, New York, NY
Lines: 39

I bought an Orchid fax, which comes bundled with
BackFAX, and I'm not thrilled.

For instance, randlom lines of pixels are dropped when
printing received faxes, although if you copy and paste
the image into a paint program, they seem to be there.
When you send a fax, the rasterization drops and adds
raster lines so that a 45 degree line sort of zigsags
about every 1/4 inch.  Also, when sending a fax, if you
preview it on the screen, a 45 degree line jags along
at something a bit off 45 degrees.  The upshot of these
weirdnesses is that lines of text appear randomly tall
and short when printed.

There are other annoyances.  A major one is that when
you want to use the modem for dialout from another
application, you have to furst go into the backFAX
application and take it out of send and receive modes
by hand; of course, when you're done dialing out,
you have to go back and re-enable backFAX.  If you
don't do this, you get ugly error messages and the
modem may have to be reset.  AppleLink in particular
realy freaks out in this situation.  Is this a problem
with BackFAX or is the Mac serial driver too dumb to
support automatic switching in a case like this?  Is
this any better under the the Comm toolbox?  The way it
should work is that a client waiting to answer the
phone should not interfere with another one that wants
to dial out.  It took years for unix serial drivers to
support this automatic line sharing, but now most of
them do (I put in a change like this once myself).

Anyone have the Abaton Interfax?
Is it good?

 --dave yost
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