Hi Dane,
In response to Chris Blouch's post about whether people had gotten
farther accessibly using the built-in FAX dialog on older machines
with built in modems you wrote:
No, I had problems navigating to the Phone Number feeld on my
Ibook
which had an in-built modem.
This won't work for the newer Macs without built-in modems, but
have
you tried just using command lines to send a FAX and typing in the
phone number? The obvious thing is to do this as an AppleScript or
Automator action, and there may be general solutions like this.
Mac OS X hints for FAX from command line (or AppleScript) at:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031128150928128
Gives this information: (for someone using terminal)
<excerpt>
The command I used to fax a document from my desktop is:
lp -d Internal_Modem -o phone=222-3333 ~/Desktop/filename.ps
This sent the fax to the fax queue just like using the Fax...
button on the Print dialog.
<snip>
other comments gave:
-o faxCoverSheet
-o faxSubject="Subject of the FAX"
-o faxCoverSheetMessage="Message for cover sheet"
-o faxTo="Person Receiving FAX"
but read the followups
<question>
I am having great dificulties with the cover sheet. Only the
first word of faxSubject, faxCoverSheetMessage & faxTo are
being transfered :-/
Anyone got a solution?
<answer>
Try URL encoding the options, e.g.
-o faxSubject="Hello%20my%20dear%20fax%20destination"
and other options:
While desperately seeking for disabling by default dial tone
detection, I've discovered these other 3 options:
-o faxWaitForDialTone=false/true
-o faxUseSound=false/true
-o faxToneDialing=false/true
The first one does what I was looking for. It works from
command line, but does not work as a key in prefs.
The other thing that popped up were references to a fax
command, but I think
it might be eaiser to use the print (lp) options. That's the
interface that
the normal FAX option button under print uses. I'd guess that
you could
send regular text and .ps (PostScript) files, since fax
supports those, and
maybe .pdf files since that's a default for printing. If pdf
doesn't work, there's
a "Save PDF as PostScript" menu option on the first "unknown"
button
in the command-p print menu that generate the PDF -- it shows up
just
above the "FAX PDF" menu option.
If you need to read about the fax command, there's a unix man
page at
the Apple Developer Connection:
http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTATION/Darwin/Reference/
ManPages/ man1/fax.1.html#//apple_ref/doc/man/1/fax
or you can read the man page. I'm not sure what the easiest way to
do this accessibly is, but in terminal you can direct long
output to
a file and open it up with TextEdit.
For example, man fax | col -b > fax_man.txt
and then open -a TextEdit fax_man.txt
There's also a page on Turning fax services on and off from the
command line:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040110002504229
On Wednesday, September 26, 2007, at 05:35AM, "Dane Trethowan"
wrote:
No, I had problems navigating to the Phone Number feeld on my
Ibook
which had an in-built modem.
On 26/09/2007, at 12:06 AM, Chris Blouch wrote:
I haven't used it but there is faxing built into MacOSX. When you
print the print dialogue is fairly inaccessible.
<snip>
Cheers,
Esther
