write to a fax machine?

skazat has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

here's an interesting use for perl. has anyone written anything that will fax some data to a known number instead of, say emailing it or writing to a file? we have client that wants orders faxed to them instead of emailing them.

i haven't run across a fax machine driver thingy (although, i haven't really looked, LOL)

does anyone have any info on this kinda stuff?

Comment on write to a fax machine?

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Re: write to a fax machine? by lhoward (Vicar) on Apr 28, 2000 at 02:35 UTC
You don't want to write directly to a fax machine in perl. Better to write to some fax software in a common format and let it managethe fax transfer. Depending on how fancy you need the fax to look and what glue layers you have available and what formats your fax software will support some good choices for output format of your program would be TeX, HTML, or plain old text. Les Howard www.lesandchris.com Author of Net::Syslog and Number::Spell	[reply]
Re: write to a fax machine? by httptech (Chaplain) on Apr 28, 2000 at 02:43 UTC
If you're on Unix, you can run Hylafax as a fax server. It can fax ASCII text; all you have to do is print out the order from your perl script and let the sendfax client interface with Hylafax to do the actual faxing.	[reply]
RE: write to a fax machine? by radixzer0 (Beadle) on Apr 28, 2000 at 02:42 UTC
Might want to take a look at either Hylafax or mgetty+sendfax. I set up a simple form-to-fax gateway deelie-bobber a while back using perl, ghostscript, and sendfax. Ugly but worked. Basically took the form elements, wrote a formated text file, used ghostscript to turn that into a Group3 fax image, and sendfax to send it. I think that in this case the best thing to do is to use perl as the wonderful glue language it is (among other things ;) to tie in external programs. BTW, a quick search on http://freshmeat.net dug up Fax::Gate (interface to HylaFax) though I've never looked at it.	[reply]