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From: gardner@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Mike Gardner)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.fax
Subject: Re: Fax Boards aren't worth SPIT!! (Part 2)
Message-ID: <1991Feb22.021532.1256@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 22 Feb 91 02:15:32 GMT
References: <1991Feb21.214618.23491@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 38

erb2x@euclid.acc.Virginia.EDU (Erik R. Bleyl) writes:

>It has been my experience as a programmer trying to use FAX applications
>from within custom appliations that most PC fax boards aren't worth SPIT.
>Many claim to offer programmer capabilities and even development possibilities
>but fall short by either restricting access on the command line or by 
>requiring massive data conversion operations.

>I have been using the Complete Communicator from the Complete PC and have found
>myself burdened by a 100K TSR and my only access to the fax from within 
>applications requires exiting the application to send any faxes.  There are
>few C communication libraries that support FAX communications as well.

I cobbled together a email to fax gateway using intel's Connection Coprocessor.
It has command line utilities which you can access from a C program fairly
easily.  The Command line utilities(including source) can be acquired from
their BBS.  Using their source for your utilities, you could directly 
access features, but I found it a lot easier to dump to a file and send it
out.  Besides ascii, They only accept DCX/PCX graphics format, but it is a
well documented, fairly simple format.  HIJAAK, another commercial product
will convert to/from most any other format.  It's not a cheap card, but you
get what you pay for.  It has a TSR, but I don't remember just how large. I
run Sun's PC/NFS networking, the FAX software, a couple of other TSR's and
still have room for a C program which processes the email and uses "SYSTEM()"
calls to invoke other command line utilities(like SMTP,POP, HIJAAK-CONVERT).

mgg
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