Good night folks,
due to special circumstances i was forced to invent a mechanism for
sending faxes though StarOffice 4.0. This has been done[1].
Now, I was thinking how people are sending faxes. How am I sending
fax messages? I used to write a plain ascii text or a LaTeX document
and send this. I need to work on the command line. How would a
person who doesn't know about commands like faxspool, sendfax, command
lines etc, send faxes? Simply he can't as there is no such frontend
for the sendfax/faxspool program.
For the problem described above I needed to write a tool that asks for
a fax number and makes an appropriate call to the faxspool program.
At the moment this is a very simple frontend[2] but it's all that's
needed for interaction with StarOffice 4.0.
I've contacted the author of the mgetty+sendfax program and he also
doesn't know about a frontend.
In fact, I feel that Linux lacks an X11 frontend for sending faxes.
I'd like to improve this tool to become a general frontend for
faxspool which will be used to integrate faxes in the X11
environment[3].
I know that I don't have the time to improve this script in the way I
should. If it depends on me the project is dead before it was born.
Therefore I'd like to receive comments about this and I'd like to
encourage some people to help me fulfilling this goal.
Here's a short list of things I'd like to have added:
. Requester covering all possible command line switches that
faxspooll offers. This could/should be done in an extra requester.
At the moment, tkfaxspool only queries for the phone number.
. Add a phone book, needs to be discussed with Gert to invent a
general solution.
. Support for mor than PostScript files.
. Add a file requester so the program might get called through the
menu of the window manager. At the moment it reads the fax to send
via stdin and only understands postscript. After doing this we
might be renamed to tkfax.
. Full integration with the sendfax package.
You see that's not difficult, right? At the moment it's written in
Tcl/Tk. If you prefer to use perl-tk, go ahead.
Now what do you think? It's a small project but nevertheless I need
help to finish it. Any volunteers?
Regards,
Joey
[1] It needs a modification in the Xpdefaults and the tkfaxspool
script, drop me a line if you need it.
[2] ftp://ftp.infodrom.north.de/pub/people/joey/misc/tkfaxspool
[3] I don't care about a console tool, becaus everyone who works on
the console should be able to use command line arguments &c.
--
/ Martin Schulze * joey@infodrom.north.de * 26129 Oldenburg /
/ If you come from outside of Finland, you live in wrong country /
/ Featuring Debian GNU/Linux motd von irc.funet.fi /
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