Printing to Fax through CUPS

Here is the way I send faxes through Open/Star Office or any other application.

Open Office will find the default printer, but will not necessarily be able to use the other printers available to the CUPS printing system. If you use KDE it is quite easy to configure Open Office so that you can print to any of the CUPS printers.

Open a terminal window. Become root with 'su'

cd /usr/lib/openoffice/program

./spadmin

A dialogue box opens which allows you to add a printer.

Select "Generic Printer" as the printer driver, and for the print command give

kprinter --stdin

When you next open OpenOffice and try to print something you will see the new printer is a available which when selected allows you to print to any printer known to CUPS.

KDE conveniently supplies three ready defined 'pseudo' printers which when invoked will print to PDF files, to Kmail, or to kdeprintfax.

Printing to a fax is simply a matter of selecting the Fax pseudo printer. However before it will work you have to configure kdeprintfax

KDEprintfax Configuration

kdeprintfax may be started from a console or from 'Kmenu>Office>Communications>Fax>KdePrintFax ' (ignore K Fax and K Send a Fax)
Select Settings>Configure KDEPrintFax

Configure your personal details, and telephone number, and select the paper size, and select Efax as the backend.

Kdeprintfax works with two different fax backends efax or hylafax. efax is the easiest to configure.
The default command string is fine so leave that unaltered.

You should also check that the correct serial port is selected The default is /dev/modem which should be a symlink to whichever port your modem is on. Alternatively you can declare the port /dev/ ttyS0 etc by selecting 'serial port 0' etc

You can test if your serial port is declared correctly by typing in a terminal window
echo ath1 > /dev/modem (or /dev/ttyS0 etc )Your modem should click as it goes off Hook. It will go back on hook with the command
echo ath0 > /dev/modem

You are now ready to send faxes

You can either select the fax printer when printing from an application, or open kdeprintfax and then drag and drop files from konqueror into the 'File' box. Files must be Postscript files.

Things to remember
1/ Do pay attention to the kdeprintfax log if a fax will not send.
2/ Do not use any font in a fax which ghostview is not aware of. This means that some Open/StarOffice fonts will cause problems. The symptom will be the print job apparently works, but the fax does not send.

Printing directly to kdeprintfax

The first section showed how to print to any of the KDE pseudo printers with kprinter. In this section I describe how to reduce the number of mouse movments and print directly to kdeprintfax from OpenOffice. This tip was submitted by a reader Steffen Barszus. Thanks Steffen!

From the spadmin window select 'New Printer', then select 'Connect a PDF converter', followed by selecting 'A specific driver'. Select 'Generic Printer' as the driver and for the print command enter 'kdeprintfax (TMP)' and select an appropriate name and paper size.

When you print to this printer from OpenOffice the kdeprintfax dialogue will open immediately.

Printing to fax with 'fax send'

An alternative method of faxing from OpenOffice for non KDE users is to use fax send. The fax script is part of the efax package. Efax is normally installed by default in Mandrake.

To set up OpenOffice, open the spadmin configuration window as before. Create a new printer of type 'fax'. Select the 'Generic Printer' driver and set the command to be 'fax send (PHONE) (TMP)' Select a name for the printer, and the appropriate paper size.

Now edit the file /etc/fax.config to make any changes necessary for your environment. Here are the lines I changed in my system :-


DEV=ttyS1
FROM="+44 118 1234567"
NAME="from Derek Jennings"
PAGE=a4
PRTYPE=ps		# Postscript (e.g. Apple LaserWriter)
#PRTYPE=pcl		# HP-PCL (e.g. HP LaserJet) 
BUSYRETRIES="30 60 120"

Now you should be able to start OpenOffice, and print with your new fax printer. You will see a dialogue box asking for the telephone number, and then the modem should start dialling. OpenOffice will freeze until the fax has completed or the retry count has been reached. This is the reason I reduced the retry count from the default fax.config. If you have problems start OpenOffice from the command line (as a user) with 'oowriter'. You will then see progress/error messages on the command line during the fax process.

Sunday 4th July 2004