webfax and kprinter

[b_a_b_a at excite.com]

Hello,

some months ago i played around with an internet-fax-option for kprinter.

Some internetproviders does offer internet2fax-gateways for their customers: 

* Compose a text message and send it to "real_faxnumber at fax.provider.com" and a fax message is send to the faxnumber. (Of course this service is not free - but still cheaper than using a real fax and you even won'T need a modem at all (inspite of ksendfax))

* compose an empty message BUT attach a (multipage)-TIFF-file will also result in a real fax at the recipient.

* The internet2fax-gateway will send you an normal email back to your account to report the fax-status


The idea is to use kprinter as TIFF-distiller-frontend and kmail for 'delivery' and everything in a "single-click"-solution ;)

So far so good. I have a NON-automatic solution now:

Ghostscript as backend will convert a postscript file into TIFF-G3 (G3 is actually the standard for analogue-fax):

"gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -dPARANOIDSAFER -dBATCH -sstdout=%stderr -sDEVICE='tiffg3' -r'204x196' -sOutputFile=print.tif print.ps"

Now I do have a correct multipage-TIFF.

For 'messaging' I have a small shell script:

"faxnumberOfRecipient=`kdialog --inputbox 'enter the faxnumber_of_your_recipient at yourinternetgate.com'`

kmail -caption FAX --subject internetfax --composer --attach print.tif $faxnumberOfRecipient"

Kdialog will ask for the faxnumber and the result will be added to the kmail-commandline.

So kmail-composer will be opened with the correct recipient-address and the tif-file is attached.

This in theorey ;) Actually kmail crash when using the "--attach"-option -> but maybe this is only a Xandros (KDE3.1.4)-specific-issue.

Nevertheless:
In the end I do have all steps to "fetch" the postscript-stream, convert it to Tiff, attach this tiff to an email, for sending it to the internet2fax-gateway...

Unfortunately I still have no idea how to "glue" this together in an automatic virtual KDE-printer.  The ps2pdf.xml-example (from the PDF-distiller option) doesn't really help me here. 
Especially as I do not have:

* any idea WHERE to get my initial Postscript-file from kprinter?
* and didn't know where to add my mini-shell-script (kdialog plus kmail)
* and how to evoke some kind of "processing" message while ghostscript converts ps to tiff (this kind of process need some time, so it'll be usefull to have some "i'm still working"-popup ;)

May you give me some advices here?

I'd really like to make this more "user-friendly".
Actually I still think this would be a nice option for a lot of people.

Thanks,
baba



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