Faxing a pdf by calling an external program

  • Thread starter Thread starter fig000
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fig000

Hi,

We have some software written in delphi 5. Up till now the solution
we've found to send faxes forces us to use word and outlook. We found
that we can create pdf files with the data we want to fax from inside
our software. What we'd like to be able to do is to write create the
pdf file in our software and call some external utility that can read
the pdf file and fax it. Obviously this would have to be called from
inside our software so we wouldn't want something that required a gui
console, just an app that can receive a file path and send a fax.

We had considered products like win fax but hope to avoid having to
install a faxing printer and using another 3rd party product that
requires installation. Is there such a utility? We are hoping to have
it work for xp and vista since many of our clients are moving to
vista.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Fig000
 
Well I'm no programmer, nor is this a programming group. All I can tell you
is that if you want the fax service to render a document, you must define a
printto verb at the OS level for the file type you want fax to render. That
works for XP Fax, but Vista WFS will be another matter since Vista no longer
uses printto verbs.
 
Russ,

Thanks for answering. Oddly this isn't really a programming issue.
I want to be able to call an external program from inside a delphi
program and pass it a file parameter. This could be done from a dos
prompt by typing something like:

ExternalProgram c:\myfile.pdf destinationphonenumber

All a program would do would be to open a dos shell and put that
command into it. What I hope the program would do is read the file in
the path and fax it to the phone number. I don't want to tie this to
any weird add ons for delphi which will eventually become obsolete.

I guess I won't go the printto route since more and more of our
customers will have vista. I appreciate your answer. If anyone has any
ideas of a program that could do this, they would be welcome.

Thanks,
Neil
 
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