[Asterisk-Users] spandsp hylafax asterisk and confusion

[Nicolas Gudino]

Hi Terry,

Terry Goodwin wrote:
> Damn! :-(
> 
> Now that I have spandsp working on my * I was going to try and get it
> working with hylafax.
> 
> Is there any other means of faxing from the desktop (windows PC) via
> asterisk?
> 
> The solution needs to be "user friendly".  I like the solution that
> allows the user to "print" from an application (word, notepad, browser,
> terminal session, etc) to a fax driver which in turn connects to the *
> server for transmission.  A bonus would be that the faxing application
> kept a "directory" of the numbers the user faxed to for easy repeat
> faxing.

I have a half implemented solution based on salsafax. Basically, you 
have to configure cups and samba to export a printer to the network, 
then you can print from any workstation to the network printer. Pros: 
you do not need any special driver on the workstations. Cons: it does 
not always work.

The problem I found is that there is no reliable way to indicate the fax 
number where the document should be sent. Salsafax extract the 
information from the ps file generated (you have to use a special syntax 
in the document for the fax number), but most of the time salsafax 
fails to decode the text, so it cannot send the fax.

So I tried harder, and modified it to perform and OCR of the document 
and try to extract the number that way. It work 75% of the time. Its 
kind of user friendly, but its not reliable.

I think that the best solution would be to implement a web interfase so 
you can specify the destination numbers from there. 1) You print to the 
fax machine 2) Enter a web page and specify the fax number/s where the 
new document should be sent 3) lets asterisk/spandsp do the job.


-- 
Nicolas Gudino
House Internet S.R.L.
Buenos Aires - Argentina