#175239: What are valid fax formats

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Dear maintainers of fax packages in Debian,

We have a bugreport against the tetex-bin package (rather old, I admit)
that complains that our dvi2fax script produces output that is not
recognized by efax.

The problem is that dvi2fax switched from producing "raw G3 data" (as
file(1) says) to making " group 3 fax data, fine resolution (204x196
DPI)" - the resolution can be configured. It seems that efax doesn't
understand the latter. 

Should this be regarded as a bug in tetex-bin? If yes, should we revert
to the old form or provide a switch for both formats? Or is the format
that efax understands (raw G3 data) deprecated?

Thanks in advance, Frank

P.S. 
raw G3 is produced with 
gs -q -dSAFER -sDEVICE=faxg3 -r$res -sOutputFile=$NAME-%03d.fax -sNOPAUSE -
(where $res is, configurable, 204x196 or 204x98)

group 3 fax is produced with 
gs -q -dSAFER -sDEVICE=dfaxhigh -sOutputFile=$NAME-%03d.fax -sNOPAUSE -

(or replace dfaxhigh by dfaxlo)

-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie