The stuff makes use of a modified version of dinbrief.sty
, called
fax.sty
(actually, I just omitted some items such as the placement of
the sender's address and placed the date line below the address box. The
sender's line for the envelope window is missing too because that's not
needed here).
Now if you write such a fax, you can make use of all dinbrief.sty
features (except those listed above). Plus, you can append arbitrary
pages to your fax (which isn't limited in terms of page numbers). So if
you want to send your friend a short and friendly fax and want to send a
screenshot of your fancy new X11 tool, you simply say
%APPEND "<filename-of-screenshot>"
%APPEND '<next-file>'
somewhere in the TeX file. You are limited to the file formats that
faxspool
recognizes (well, those are quite a few). You might want
to care for proper file name extensions because this makes it easier for
faxspool
to choose the correct conversion tool. Unfortunately,
faxspool
still isn't too smart when it comes to automatic file type
recognition. E.g. if you want to append a file to be interpreted as "plain
ASCII", select ".t" or ".txt" extensions (see faxspool
source for more
information).
After TeX'ing the file with tex-buffer
(C-c C-b) or tex-file
(C-c
C-f), a small Lisp routine (tex-send-fax
, called by C-c C-x) takes the
current TeX buffer and picks some items as the sender's name (for
sendfax
's "verbose_to"), the fax number (recognized by a line starting
with Fax-Nr.:
, preferably in the address paragraph starting with
\begin{letter}
) and appendices if applicable. If some of the append files
are unreadable, you are warned in the Emacs minibuffer. The command line
for faxspool
is composed and fed into the inferior tex shell, being
shown in the tex-shell window just like when you do C-c C-b.
To get a nice header page easily, I chose not to set it
up in LaTeX. Instead, I use a \special
command to
transparently underlay an arbitrary postscript page
(for available header and footer space, see
README.headerpage
). Thus, you can generate your
favourite header page with any postscript-capable tool
(WinWord, Corel Draw, Photoshop, Quark Express, xfig,
you name it) without fuzzing around with TeX. Thus, the
header page layout is decoupled from
fax.sty
. Plus, you can choose different header
pages for different addressees. You could even assign
certain header pages to specific addressees
automagically if you were urged to do so. It's just a
matter of the file name in the PSFILE \special
. To
use tsfax
, it's advantageous to know something
about TeX BTW. ;-)
To preview the page with xdvi
, you need to have xdvi-18
or later
because earlier versions cannot handle \special{PSFILE}
macros. In
case of doubt, consult the xdvi
installation instructions. If you
don't have Display Postscript or NeWS, you need to have xdvi
properly
configured to use Ghostscript. Recent xdvi
versions can be found on
all CTAN ftp sites, such as
ftp.dante.de
. Preview is thus be made through tex-view
(C-c C-v).
As for printing, I no longer support tex-send-fax-print
. The
dvi2lj
filters are very buggy; at least for my Sharp JX-9500 printer,
they sometimes produce horrible garbage. I prefer converting everything to
Postscript and piping it through Ghostscript. Thus, this version of
tsfax
only supports direct printing from the tex-mode, i.e. via
tex-print
(C-c C-p). Here as well, the appendices aren't printed, only
the header page.
That's all. It's fairly simple and in proper lack of superfluous features ;-)
Next Chapter, Previous Chapter
Table of contents of this chapter, General table of contents
Top of the document, Beginning of this Chapter