mgetty and printing faxes

[Erik van der Meulen <eme@ncm.nl>]

Dear All,

I am a bit confused about the printing of faxes received by mgetty.
At first I did not know any provisions where provided by mgetty, so I wrote
a tiny script, triggered by a sendmail alias which read faxes from the spool
directory and fed them straight into

        g3topbm -l <fax_name>

This did sort of work, its not very elegant and provided very poor quality
printing of normal resolution faxes.
Then I had a look at the mgetty source package, and discovered the option of
executing the

        /usr/lib/mgetty+sendfax/new_fax

script, which seemed to be able to do just that. I then took the script
new_fax.lj and installed that together with the netpbm package. This drained
all my memory (small system, 8 Mb RAM 18 Swap) and failed to produce
high-res faxes, barely managed normal res. Those did look good.
Than I noticed that the netbpm package had replaced mgetty's g3topbm.

I manage to print some faxes, but the script takes ages to process. Somerhow
I have a feeling that things could be optimized here. If anyone has done any
experimenting in this area, I would be very interested in finding out their
results. I use a hp4l and the magicfilter package.

Thanks very much!

Erik van der Meulen
eme@ncm.nl