Sending a Fax

[Robert Bonomi]

> From owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org  Thu May  5 21:50:34 2011
> From: Doug Hardie <bc979 at lafn.org>
> Date: Thu, 5 May 2011 19:21:29 -0700
> To: FreeBSD Questions <questions at freebsd.org>
> Cc: 
> Subject: Sending a Fax
>
> One of my clients needs to send a lot of faxes.  He has a Brother 8680DN 
> which will fax.  Any ideas how to send a file to it and get it to send a 
> fax?  I am not finding anything beyond printing for that unit via 
> Google.

Not to belabor the obvious, but do you have the owners manual?  what does
it say about faxing?

*MOST* computer-driven "fax machines" have the 'logical equivalent' of a
serial port, to which you send specialized "AT" (extended Hayes modem
commands) to go into fax mode, and originate a call. Then you shovel out
a bit-stream that is the  already rasterized fax data.

I've always used 'Hylafax' -- a _smart_ fax-management daemon that supports
a whole bunch of different kinds of fax modems, handles -multiple- fax-
modems, automatic retries, etc., etc.  It supports a very simple protocol
for queueing faxes from applicatioons, or the command line, and handles
either ASCII or PostScript input.