Subject: mgetty and printing faxes

From: Erik van der Meulen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 10:45:16 +0200

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
[email-masked]

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From: Nils Rennebarth <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 14:03:42 +0200 (MET DST)

On Tue, 27 Aug 1996, Erik van der Meulen wrote:
>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.

>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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Kristian Köhntopp <[email-masked]            | Schillerstr. 61 
>>I'd also be interested in the comparison [of Linux] | 37083 Göttingen
>>with a cisco router. I assume a factor of about ten.| ++49-551-71626
>What? faster or slower?                              | http://www.nus.
Cheaper!                                              | de/~nils

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From: [email-masked] (Emanuele Pucciarelli)
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 14:39:44 +0200 (OIL DST)

> results. I use a hp4l and the magicfilter package.

After many experiments with the netpbm package, with the same bad
results you got, I finally found on sunsite a program named "g3vga"
(/pub/Linux/apps/graphics/viewers/). It includes a very quick g32ps
command: you can use it to convert your fax in a PS file, and the print it
with GhostScript (maybe directly with lpr, I don't use magicfilter).

/___
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/___manuele ([email-masked])