Configuring HotWire EasyFAX

HotWire EasyFAX must be properly configured before it will work properly. It is necessary to pay special attention to this chapter,

When you run the HotWire program for the first time you are automatically placed in the Configuration screen. The Configuration screen is divided up into several topics, grouped together by the presence of the Group Box bearing the title of this topic.
 

    The topics are:

Fax and Printer Resolution  
Notification, Intervals and Cleanup
Communications Parameters 
ASCII Attachments 
 

 

Fax and Printer Resolution

 
Print Incoming.  Select this checkbox if you want faxes to be printed as soon as they are received. 
Print Outgoing. Select this checkbox if you want faxes that you send to be printed immediately they are successfully transmitted.
Printer Selection Combo Box. Click on the little arrow to the right of this field to display a list of printers configured on your computer system. Use the mouse to select the printer that you want as your DEFAULT printer - you can override this choice at any time when you choose to print from the program. This simply selects the printer to be used when faxes are recieved and sent the the two preceding options are checked
Printer Type Selection. Choose one of the two types of printer that you have. Any of the Hewlett Packard Laser Printers, or a Postscript type printer. If you have another printer type, you can configure a "printer" on your system and call it, say, FaxPrinter, and configure it to print to a file on the hard drive. Select PostScript type on the HotWire EasyFax Configuration dialog and select your printer "FaxPrinter". Now when you print to FaxPrinter a file with the fax output will be created on your hadr disk, and you can use GhostScript (the "gs" command) to print it to another type of printer. NOTE: An 8x11 page fax image in PostScript format will be huge, probably over a megabyte, so make sure that you create the print-file on a partition with lots of disk space. Read the FAQs, Man Pages and other help on the "gs" command to see how to format the command line or eliminate the temporary file and pipe the postscript output into the "gs" command.
Coverpage / Default.ps. This will be the default coverpage or lead-sheet that precedes each fax you send if you have selected coverpage for this fax. You can have an unlimited number of coverpages and choose them randomly. This options simply specifies the DEFAULT coverpgae to be used. If you have checked this item and selected ANY coverpage as the default, then all faxes that you send will default to this coverpage unless you specify another coverpage or none. See the chapter on Coverpage Creation for more information on how to create your own custom coverpages.
Monitor Transmission. If this item is checked, each time you send a fax, a window will pop up displaying detailes on the progress of the creation and dispatch of this fax. Turn this off unless debugging a problem or you like screen clutter.
Fine Resolution. Check this item if you want your faxes to be sent in "fine" resolution by default.
HP Laser - Scale to 8x11.  HP LaserJet output will usually print at 300 dpi. This results in a fax covering only about one half of the 8x11 page, making it a little hard to read. By checking this item, faxes are "scaled" or zoomed to fit the 8x11 page, making them larger and eiser to read.
PostScript - Invert Black / White. Just a feature that PostscScript printers have. Do not check this by default. If you have a fax that's MOSTLY black and hard to read, check this before printing it.
 


 

Notification, Intervals & Cleanup

 
Mail Users upon receipt. If you want email to be sent to onre or more users when a fax is received, check this item. There is a box into which you can enter a list of users or email addresses that you want to receive notification when faxes arrive and when other events (below) occur,
Notify unread after (days). If a received fax is still unread (viewd or printed) after the number of days specified here, entries in the mailing list are notified. Enter 0 days for no notification.
Remove inbound after (days). Remove inbound faxes after they have been on the hard disk (read or unread) for more than this numberof days. Enter 0 days to never remove them automatically. 
Remove outbound after (days). Same as above, but applies only to faxes that you have sent, and retained a copy of on the hard drive. 
Max Retries. This is the maximum number of times that any given fax transmission will be retried if unsuccessful. The sender is notified via email when this threshold is reachd and the fax has not been successfully transmitted.
Interval (min). This is the minimum amount of time (in minutes) that must elapse before a failed transmission can be retried. 
Await Answer. This is the number of SECONDS that HotWire EasyFax will wait after the modem has dialed the number, until connection is established with the remote Fax or Modem. If you find that HotWire gives up before the remote systems answer failry often, increase this number.
User List. This is a list of space-separated usernames that should receive email notifications.
 

Communications Parameters.

 
Modem Type. Click on the little arrow to the right of the combo box and select the modem type that you have. If your modem is not listed here, experiment with each of the ones that we have - theres usually one that will operate your modem. If nothing works, check out the newsgroups on the 'net for info on how to create your own Modemcap entry in the "modems" file.
Flow Control. Select whether your modem is going to use either Hardware or Software flow control. Only use Software flow control if you absolutely cannot get hardware flow control to work.
IN / OUT Bit Order.  These should usually both have the same setting. A notable exception is the ZOOM V32bis modem. FOr ZOOM, set IN to LSB and OUT to MSB. If your images are received, but you cannot view them, try changing these parameters.
Speed. Duh! This is the baud rate between your computer and the faxmodem and has nothing to do with the actual link speed. Set it to the highest value that your faxes will work at.
Inbound Connections Allowed.  HotWire EasyFax can automatically detect whether an incoming call is from a data modem or a Faxmodem or Fax machine. Using these options, check wich type of incoming connections are allowed. If the "Listener" is disabled off the Main Menu's "Admin" pull-down menu, then these options are ignored and no incoming connections are allowed. If "Fax" is checked, then incoming faxes will be received. If "Data" is checked and a data connection is made, a "login: " is spawned and the remote caller can then log into the computer, subject to the normal UNIX security criteria.
Port. This describes the name of the UNIX device that addresses the faxmodem. If the port is in the /dev directory, then just the name of the port will suffice (eg. ttyS1). If the UNIX device node resides elsewhere, enter the fully qualified pathname for this device (eg. /dev/terms/tty0A03). 
Init String #1 and #2. Do not use these fields at all unless you are intimitely familiar with modems and fax transmissions. They are here for communications/modem gurus only, so that they can overrid the modem initialization strings. 
CSID (My name). This is the unique identifying string that your faxmodem will use when identifying itself to remote fax connections. Enter either your company name, your name or telephone number here.
My Fax Number. Enter your fax number, including the area code here. This information is included in your coverpage so that people know who to respond to.
   

ASCII Attachments

 
Portrait Normal 8.5" format - text down the page vertically
Landscape Normal 8.5" format - text accross the page horizontally
Lines per inch / Six Six lines per inch (lpi) is the usual amount of space betweens lines of text if you're use a 12 or 10 pitch font.
Lines per inch /  Eight Eight lines per inch will give you less white-space between lines of text.  This is common if you're using a 15 pitch font.
Long Lines / Wrap This tells the ASCII-Postscript converter how to deal with lines that are longer than 72 characters.  If checked, lines longer than 72 characters will be word-wrapped onto the next line.
Long Lines / Truncate This tells the ASCII-Postscript converter how to deal with lines that are longer than 72 characters.  If checked, lines longer than 72 characters will be truncated.
Character Pitch This tells the ASCII to Postscript converter how much space to leave between characters.
Tabstop This tells the ASCII to Postscript converter how to deal with tabs in the incoming ascii text.  Tabs are replaced with this number of spaces.
Page Length After this number of lines of text on a single page, the ASCII to Postscript converter will insert a new page and continue the text on that page.
 

Notes about the HotWire EasyFAX configuration screen:

In release 2 not all the features are fully implimented. The automatic removal of inbound and outbound faxes after a determined time lapse is not implemented. Also, the "Font" field in ASCII conversions is not implemented.

SPECIAL SERIAL PORTS:

There is a special parameter in the configuration that cannot be edited from the User Interface. You must use vi, emacs or another such editor to edit this ascii file. If you have idividual serial ports for Hardware and Software Flow Control, then will need to change the "IoctlHandshake" parameter to a value of 0 (zero). Some Device driver for serial ports, eg. Stallion, UnixWare, others) have distinct port names for the hardware and software handshake ports, for example tty0s or tty0h for software and hardware handshake respectively. If you're using this type of seriapl driver, when HotWire goes to set the Flow Control it will fail. Normally the failure to set the Flow Control causes HotWire to quit, but , since the device driver automatically provides the handshake itself, its not really without proper flow control. So, we set this IoctlHandshake parameter to 0 so that HotWire will continue, even if the Handshake/Flow Control setting fails.

 
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