Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Other: Faxy Lady

Well, it's official! I am soon to be gainfully employed! I just faxed in my signed offer letter! So, of course, I got to practice and refine my FreeBSD faxing skills. Here's an update:

  • I decided to see if my crappy scanner would work with SANE. The docs said the model was supported and worked reasonably well, and in fact the program did recognize the scanner and got it to make scary noises, but it would just hang after the physical scan stopped, so I gave up because I didn't much care and just scanned under Windows. This time I decided to save it in BMP, just because NetPBM supports it and it's not a lossy format.
  • Now, here's the sweet part. The fax was four pages, named p#.bmp. I got this conversion thing down now:
    > bmptoppm p1.bmp | ppmtopgm | pamditherbw | pamtopnm | pnmtotiff -g3 -rowsperstrip 2500 > p1.tif
    > bmptoppm p2.bmp | ppmtopgm | pamditherbw | pamtopnm | pnmtotiff -g3 -rowsperstrip 2500 > p2.tif
    > bmptoppm p3.bmp | ppmtopgm | pamditherbw | pamtopnm | pnmtotiff -g3 -rowsperstrip 2500 > p3.tif
    > bmptoppm p4.bmp | ppmtopgm | pamditherbw | pamtopnm | pnmtotiff -g3 -rowsperstrip 2500 > p4.tif
    > tiffcp -c g3 p[1-4].tif fax.g3
  • Then I copied it over to the old machine with the hardware modem and boom! (Well, actually, I wondered why the modem couldn't dial and eventually realized I had accidentally unplugged the phone line when I was messing around with stuff last week. But once I plugged it in again, boom!)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great news about the job! I am delighted for you. :) -Kla

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