Document Transmission
By Terry Smythe
A few days ago, Harry Couchman in Australia, requested some assistance regarding restoration of his Schultz player piano. I dug up for him some old documentation out of my files and was prepared to photocopy them and send them out by snail mail. Harry might receive the stuff in about 2-3 weeks. An interesting procedure emerged which may be of interest to those wondering how to send complex paper documents through the InterNet.
1. Because the documents in question are both in bound books, I first had to make good clean photocopies at my friendly neighborhood Office Depot.
2. My wife and I have 2 telephone lines in our home. I have a tired old fax machine I picked up at a garage sale for $25; it's only claim to fame is that is has a "fine" resolution setting.
3. Using my wife's telephone line, I faxed the photocopies into WinFaxPro in my computer 3 feet away.
4. WinFaxPro has a feature of being able to convert a fax image into a .PCX graphics file, which I did for all pages.
5. Using my favorite graphics editor, Ansel for Windows, I cleaned up the .PCX files to get rid of extraneous text, marginal data like line noise, multi-ring black spots, etc
6. I uploaded the .PCX files into my home directory at my InterNet Service Provider.
7. Using PINE, my on-line mail reader, I opened a message to Harry, "attached" one of the .PCX files and emailed it to him. I did this for every .PCX file separately because each was around 200k in size.
8. All these message got through to Harry in Australia within minutes, where he dropped into PINE's (V)iewer, then (S)aved the .PCX attached file to his own home directory, from which he downloaded them into his own computer.
9. Using his favorite word processor, he opened a full page frame, and imported the .PCX graphic into that frame. Then a normal print of the document produced at his end, within just a few hours, rather than 2-3 weeks, a legible document, complete with illustrations and all text. Resolution was satisfactory, although not as good as the original.
Basically, I used my old fax machine as if it was a full page scanner, converted the resulting fax image to a graphic file, then squirted the collection of .PCX files through the InterNet to Harry at no cost to me. Perhaps Harry could provide some insight of what happened at his end, and if he incurred a cost at his end.
Something to think about...........
Regards,
Terry
Terry Smythe |*Sounds of Yesteryear*
55 Rowand Avenue | Restoration and enjoyment of vintage
Winnipeg, MB R3J 2N6 | automatic musical instruments
(204) 832-3982 | email: smythe@mbnet.mb.ca
[ Terry,
[ This is a great example of how to use the Internet for collaboration
[ on a project. I'm unfamiliar with the internal format of a .PCX graphics
[ file, but a "back of the envelope" computation leads me to believe that
[ the files you generated may be compressible. G3 fax, by default, is
[ run-length encoded, and each group of 4 scan lines are "difference
[ encoded" which provides pretty good compression for typewritten text.
[ It fails miserably for halftones, but that probably isn't what you are
[ doing here. Consider that modern fax machines claim 15-20 seconds per
[ page. Since most transmit at 9600 baud, that means that they can
[ compress a typical page to about 20k. You probably can too. You can
[ try "compressed TIFF", GIF, or even JPEG as experiments. You can
[ probably find public domain programs to do these conversions You can
[ try ZIPping any of these files. The ones that are already well
[ compressed will not shrink much. The .PCX file might ZIP to 50% or
[ less in size. I have enought time to do a few experiments. If you
[ still have the files online, would you mind e-mailing them to the
[ rollreq@foxtail.com account ?
[ Thanks.
[ Jody |
(Message sent Sat 17 Feb 1996, 17:34:47 GMT, from time zone GMT-0600.) |
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