Posted by Jim Guerber on June 25, 2007 at 12:17:26: Uploaded files: 1
I wanted to talk about what I found when investigating Microsoft Fax.
To summarize, MS fax is quite a LAME product. Several MS sites say that fax technology for Microsoft is "under the radar", meaning there is no time devoted to the product from anyone within MS.
I started implementing the COM version of MS fax because it was the version that MS pushes the hardest. I used their VB sample program and it took most of a day before I could get to just send the cover page. There are several issues:
1. In some places, you specify the server name, and in others you specify the printer name.
2. This product is not well documented.
3. In any case, after making 10 to 20 calls to their software, if anything was wrong, the last call results in a long error number that tells you that something was wrong with no details.
Once I got the fax software to send the cover page, I started to work on sending various documents in the fax body.
To render a file, some software must convert the file to a graphic representation in a special TIF file format.
The MS software uses the file type extension with a call of "PRINTTO" to the application responsible for that particular file type to render the file.
1. In many cases (including .TXT on my machine), there was no PRINTTO associated with the file type. -- General fax error on the submit.
2. Using Google, I could find several PRINTTO methods for file types such as .TXT and .PDF.
3. HTML files are an interesting sub case. There seems to be no way to render an HTML file for faxing without having to deal with a dialog popping up asking you to specify the printer. According to MS this is "by design".
4. ... and this clinched it... The MS software is designed to send only ONE body file. You cannot specify multiple files to compose the same fax.
Well, so much for MS fax. I am attaching the vb source to this post. I have placed comments here and there as notes to myself (and you).
I am now looking at cleaning up our current fax software and perhaps writing a fax server program for Comet using the current software. Over the years, Signature has developed at least 3 fax solutions. All 3 are found in our documentation. This makes it very confusing to implement.