Tribblix: manual page: fax2ps.1

FAX2PS(1) User Commands FAX2PS(1)

NAME

fax2ps - convert a TIFF facsimile to compressed PostScripttm

SYNOPSIS

fax2ps [ options ] [ file ... ]

DESCRIPTION

fax2ps reads one or more TIFF facsimile image files and prints a
compressed form of PostScript on the standard output that is suitable
for printing.

By default, each page is scaled to reflect the image dimensions and
resolutions stored in the file. The -x and -y options can be used to
specify the horizontal and vertical image resolutions (lines/inch),
respectively. If the -S option is specified, each page is scaled to
fill an output page. The default output page is 8.5 by 11 inches.
Alternate page dimensions can be specified in inches with the -W and
-H options.

By default fax2ps generates PostScript for all pages in the file.
The -p option can be used to select one or more pages from a multi-
page document.

fax2ps generates a compressed form of PostScript that is optimized
for sending pages of text to a PostScript printer attached to a host
through a low-speed link (such as a serial line). Each output page
is filled with white and then only the black areas are drawn. The
PostScript specification of the black drawing operations is optimized
by using a special font that encodes the move-draw operations
required to fill the black regions on the page. This compression
scheme typically results in a substantially reduced PostScript
description, relative to the straightforward imaging of the page with
a PostScript image operator. This algorithm can, however, be
ineffective for continuous-tone and white-on-black images. For these
images, it sometimes is more efficient to send the raster bitmap
image directly; see tiff2ps(1).

OPTIONS

-p number Print only the indicated page. Multiple pages may be
printed by specifying this option more than once.

-x resolution
Use resolution as the horizontal resolution, in dots/inch,
of the image data. By default this value is taken from the
file.

-y resolution
Use resolution as the vertical resolution, in lines/inch,
of the image data. By default this value is taken from the
file.

-S Scale each page of image data to fill the output page
dimensions. By default images are presented according to
the dimension information recorded in the TIFF file.

-W width Use width as the width, in inches, of the output page.

-H height Use height as the height, in inches, of the output page.

DIAGNOSTICS

Some messages about malformed TIFF images come from the TIFF library.

Various messages about badly formatted facsimile images may be
generated due to transmission errors in received facsimile. fax2ps
attempts to recover from such data errors by resynchronizing decoding
at the end of the current scanline. This can result in long
horizontal black lines in the resultant PostScript image.

NOTES

If the destination printer supports PostScript Level II then it is
always faster to just send the encoded bitmap generated by the
tiff2ps(1) program.

BUGS

fax2ps should probably figure out when it is doing a poor job of
compressing the output and just generate PostScript to image the
bitmap raster instead.