Faxes come as lines of "dots", about 200 of them per inch vertically
and near to 1800 dots accross (for a normal resolution, A4 page), i.e.
approx. 200 d.p.i. in both directions.
However, the lines are transmitted already somewhat compressed, as
run-length encoded, bit-wise defined "tokens" (these are listed in the
ITU standards, in the so-called "T-4 list"), but while a fax machine
would expand these immediately into dots to burn into the paper - where
the bits are "1", or just not, where the bits are "0" -, fax programs
store them in all sorts of *own* formats and compressions for their own
purpose to use in a pixel display (for instance, they convert the
bit-stream of T-4 "tokens" to TIFF or whatever they would use; T-4 is
not a very efficient compression). The best thing you can expect to
get out of this would be a "true" reproduction of those lines of pixels,
at those 200 d.p.i. of the original (most screens are less than 70 dpi
across, hardly more than 40 dpi vertically, the fax prog has to
recalculate the data for display or, differently, for the printer).
If it's (well, well: *very* comparably) easy to convert ASCII/text
bytes into fax formatted output then it's a dang business the other
way round, and a full OCR prog would be the only way to do it: not
even thinkable otherwise.
(And the Hungarian "Recognita" indeed did get all the best benchmarks
for DOS OCR-progs at the time.)
But as by now most "faxes" are produced as byte-defined "text"/ASCII
in a 'puter first, it's indeed an enormous "detour" (and waste) to
transmit such pure text as fax to another 'puter. <sigh> But tell that
to those pixelomaniacs.</sigh>
// Heimo Claasen // <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> // Brussels 2000-01-25
HomePage of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.inti.be/hammer
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