Hylafax is a great, reliable fax server. It works with almost any fax modem. The main web page is at www.hylafax.org
Oscar instructions cab be found at: http://oscarmanual.org/oscar_emr_12/developers/hylafax/hylafax
I’ve installed another Open Source program that does OCR. It’s called tesseract-ocr code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
To install hylafax just type: sudo apt-get install hylafax-server
sudo faxaddmodem
ttyS0 is the default serial modem
ttyACM0 is used for USB modems
sudo adduser [faxuser] uid=1002 pass=faxpass
faxadduser -a [adminpass] -p [userpass] -u [uid] [username]
Now, once hylafax has saved the incoming fax as a .tif image, I generate a .pdf AND a .txt file containing the OCRed data.
Ubuntu notes:
/var/spool/hylafax/bin/faxrcvd processes incoming faxes.
/var/spool/hylafax/bin/tiff2pdf can convert .tif files to .pdf
/var/spool/hylafax/recvq is the folder that contains the incoming faxes (in .tif format).
/var/spool/hylafax/log contains the log of each call.
/var/log/hylafax contains the program logs
Configuration:
/etc/hylafax/config.ttyS0 – has parameters for the modem on COM1:
AreaCode: 514
FAXNumber: +1.514.555.1212
RecvFileMode: 0600 is the default for the received file mode. I change it to 0644
LocalIdentifier: Oscar Fax Machine
Customization:
/var/spool/hylafax/etc/FaxDispatch is where you can add code to convert and/or redirect the incoming faxes. It is called from the faxrcvd script.
The following can be added to FaxDispatch to automatically convert incoming faxes (.tif) to adobe (.pdf)
if [ -f $FILE ]; then
/var/spool/hylafax/bin/tiff2pdf -o ${FILE}.pdf $FILE
chmod 644 ${FILE}.pdf
fi
Client software:
If you want to view the incoming faxes or use Hylafax to send faxes, there are a number of Hylafax compatible clients that you can use. On my Windows Vista PC, I am currently using YajHFC (Yet another java Hylafax Fax Client). Since this is a Java client, it should also work on Linux and Mac.
Another simpler option is to make the incoming fax folder shared (using Samba) and allow access to the folder.
Links:
edoceo.com/liber/network-hylafax-samba