Re: mgetty and printing faxes

[Nils Rennebarth <nils@nus.de>]

On Tue, 27 Aug 1996, Erik van der Meulen wrote:
>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,
Sorry. The package was put together rather hasty and misses a lot of
things.

>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.
This is because pbmtools need a *lot* of memory for big images.
The problem is that the original fax comes at a resolution of 
204x196 (high) or 204x98 (low) which is rather different from the 300 dpi
of the LJ4.

The new_fax.lj script first scales up the fax and reduces it thereafter.
This will take a long time with 8MB.

Try to use a pipe with g3topbm and then pbmtolj with resolution set to 150.

I use a deskjet where pbmtolj takes ages for *printing*, so my pipe is
basically:

        $G3TOPBM $STRETCH $FAX \
        | $PNMTOPS -width 8.27 -height 11.7 2>/dev/null \
        | $GS -sDEVICE=djet500 -r300 -sOutputFile='|lpr' -sPAPERSIZE=a4 \
              -q -dNOPAUSE -

That gives a delay of 3s between the arrival of a fax and printing, but
that's on a 16MB Machine. I remember that the same script took about 30s
delay on a not heavily loaded 8MB machine. The printing is as fast as the
deskjet is capable, i.e. ~30s per page.

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