g3togif (was: web fax viewer...)

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Hi,

Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> the solution of sending the g3 file as image/g3fax, and spawn a viewer
> at the client side (e.g. viewfax) is certainly the best solution from
> the technical point of view, since viewfax is fast and easy to use. I
> am not sure if there is something comparable to viewfax (in terms of
> speed and ease of use) on the Windows side.

Yes, that's true, but what to do, if there isonly a windows. What Iwas
thinking about in this point, was somehing like a 'port' from viewfax into
java so you can use it with every java-capable system (an applet in this
case, perhaps a java-program wil be better). I have the code here and I've
had several long talks with gert what viewfax is doing how and why.

> g3togif program. The biggest problem I see is that fax are pretty
> large (some 1700x2220 pixels) and usually do not fit within a page.

That will be the problem of your browser or of your java-application - you
will need something with scrollbars. It will be the same if you have an
image, or if you put the picture *directly* into the web-page, if you open
a seperated java-applet-window for the picture, you have to implement
scrollbars or simmilar things. No problem, but we shouldn't forget it.

I had some size-tests here with real faxes and I had the feeling, that
only the largest and the one smaller fax-size is readable in every case -
so we will need it.

> I think the best results could be achieved by producing a gif file
> with about 100dpi on each direction and using antialiasing when
> scaling down (i.e the resulting file could have 3-4 grey levels).

??? gray levels? did I miss a step? As far as I know there is only black
and white in a fax. If I want to smooth it, I can use jpg, that produces
beautiful small pictures, but in some cases hopelessly unreadable ones.
(That's why I didn't use jpg).

> If this proves satisfactory, I suppose even the conversion can be done
> on the fly without too much concern; I do not belive a fax page is
> going to get hundreds of hit per day :) .

The problem are not the hits, the problem is the time. If you klick on the
whatever to get the fax viewed, you don't like to wait an hour, you don't
like the mashine to be unusable (because of high load) and you don't like
to have a connection with 6 seconds of pingtime (large picture to
transport) - We need something between this and I'm verry clueless,
because I'm not sure whatsolution will fit that :(

neko
-- 
neko@greenie.muc.de 	 Simone Demmel		Muenchen (Germany)
Fax.: 089/354 59 80 		 http://greenie.muc.de/~neko/
"... Usenet, als das Usenet noch Usenet war, und kein nicht-klickbares
Anhaengsel des WWW ..."					(Gert Doering)
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