CopiaFacts includes a number of ways to view and print faxes, and to notify their receipt and transmission by e-mail.
Viewing Faxes
The FFVIEWER program is the principal way to view fax files. It can open files in all supported fax file formats and view each page of the fax. It can also display the details of the size and encoding of each page.
FFCLIENT also has built-in fax viewers which allow faxes to be previewed before transmission and offer a quick view of received faxes. FFCLIENT can also use FFVIEWER to view complete received files from the list of received faxes.
In COPIAEDIT, when a fax filename is shown in an FS or MCF file, you can highlight the filename and right-click the file to open it for viewing in FFVIEWER.
Printing Faxes
FFVIEWER also has facilities to print faxes. The print menu has options to print all or selected pages, and also to assemble a printed page containing thumbnail versions of separate pages.
Converting Faxes to Other Formats
Received faxes which are to be e-mailed can be converted to PDF and other image formats while the e-mail is being prepared for transmission. This is done automatically by specifying the required content-type parameter on the $email_attach command. The conversion creates either a multi-page PDF or separate images for each page.
Supported formats are PDF, JPG, PNG and GIF. In the case of PDF, setting the case of the letters p,d,f in the application/pdf content type controls the format (Letter, A4) of the created PDF file.
Making Thumbnail Images of Faxes
CopiaFacts provides a function CreateThumbNail in the application support library to create a small image of just the first page of a fax. This can then be included in the body of a notification e-mail, which may then also include either a link to the full file or an attachment containing the file. The CopiaFacts standard scripts for notification of incoming faxes and of outbound fax results illustrate this technique.
The CreateThumbNail function supports .BMP, .GIF, .JPG (or .JPEG) and .PNG fixed size image formats, and allows the size to be set from 1/1 to 1/16 of the fax page size. Note that the image may need to be scaled again if you specify a different size when embedding the image in the HTML e-mail body. This action will reduce its clarity.
The CreateThumbNail function, like all application support functions, can be tested with FFTESTAS.
It is also possible to trace a fax image to create a scalable format file (SVG), which can provide a much higher quality, more legible, thumbnail image at the expense of a somewhat larger image file. Most fax pages will result in an output file under 200kb, but some fax first pages which contain shading or pictures (so already a large TIF file) will also create a larger SVG, perhaps a megabyte or more. An SVG which you embed in a notification e-mail can be saved by the recipient and viewed at any size with minimal loss of quality; it is often clearer than the first page of the original fax because the processing removes any 'speckle'.
For the raster to vector conversion we recommend the installation of an Open Source utility named Potrace, but other raster to vector applications are available. The binary version of this program can be downloaded from http://potrace.sourceforge.net along with the source code and documentation if required. We recommend the 64-bit binary version, and all you need from the ZIP is the exe file. The Potrace maintainer also has a 'donate' link at https://sourceforge.net/projects/potrace. The Potrace license is GPLv2: CopiaFacts can call your own downloaded copy of this program, but its license prevents us from installing it automatically or undertaking any Potrace-specific integration.
To use this program, Potrace.exe can be installed for example in the same folder as CopiaFacts programs, and can then be invoked by using the custom keyword in CreateThumbNail, with a command-line specified in the THUMB_CUSTOM variable. Potrace requires a .BMP version of the TIF file as input. To use for example PRI_EM to send an SVG thumbnail file of a received fax, the following changes would be needed in PRI_EM.IIF, and the other PRI_EMn.IIF files would need to be changed to use the same created SVG file:
$set_var THUMBNAIL "@PR%FAXPATH"
$set_var THUMBNAIL $ext ".bmp"
$set_var SVGTHUMB @THUMBNAIL
$set_var SVGTHUMB $ext ".svg"
$set_var BMP_RC "$fn:CreateThumbNail('@PR%FAXPATH', '@THUMBNAIL', 1)"
$set_var THUMB_CUSTOM "@PFC\Potrace.exe -s -o %2 %1DEL"
$set_var SVG_RC "$fn:CreateThumbNail('@THUMBNAIL', '@SVGTHUMB', CUSTOM)"
....
$email_attach "`SVGTHUMB" "EMBEDDED:image/svg+xml"
In your HTML body, you need only set the width of the image that you require; the SVG content will maintain its own aspect ratio.
