Product Description

Most modems today have fax capability and come bundled with fax software, but their manuals are strangely silent about how the whole process works. This first part of this book gives a basic grounding in fax modem technology to both the novice and experienced user. It explains why fax machines are easy to set up and then work every time, but computer faxes are tricky to install and often fail to work reliably. The second part is a complete reference for technical users. From the computer hardware and system software on your desk through the modem itself to the international standards set by ANSI, the CCITT and ITU, this section brings all the relevant technical documentation together in one place. Part three shows how easy it is to write your own fax software. Full code is presented and developed for turning ordinary text into fax images and then transmitting them, as well as for receiving faxes and displaying them on screen or printing them out. A disk with full source code and many associated utilities is included.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #530978 in Books
• Published on: 1995-11-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 380 pages

Ingram
Margolis provides complete coverage of exactly how fax modems work, along with practical suggestions showing how they can be programmed for optimal performance. The necessary technical standards such as CCITT and EIA that illustrate the working code for generating, sending, receiving, and outputting faxes are covered. Full code and standards included on disk.

From the Publisher
Most modems today have fax capability and come bundled with fax software, but their manuals are strangely silent about how the whole process works. This first part of this book gives a basic grounding in fax modem technology to both the novice and experienced user. It explains why fax machines are easy to set up and then work every time, but computer faxes are tricky to install and often fail to work reliably. The second part is a complete reference for technical users. From the computer hardware and system software on your desk through the modem itself to the international standards set by ANSI, the CCITT and ITU, this section brings all the relevant technical documentation together in one place. Part three shows how easy it is to write your own fax software. Full code is presented and developed for turning ordinary text into fax images and then transmitting them, as well as for receiving faxes and displaying them on screen or printing them out. A disk with full source code and many associated utilities is included.

Customer Reviews

This is a must fax resource
This is a great book.
Very well written.
The source code works great.

Complete fax development book
I needed information how to develope a fax sending program for a fax modem, but it was hard to get the information. But this book solved all my problem.

Extremely comprehensive reference
This book receives five enthusiastic stars for the outstanding information content but only four stars for the included sample software.

I've been a commercial software developer for more than ten years, and I was surprised to see how much I learned in this book. The information content is the best I've ever seen for a fax modem book, and Andrew Margolis' writing style is professional and very easy to read. He is clearly a veteran of this business, and it seems like he really enjoys writing.

He exhaustively covers virtually everything that one would need to do anything with a fax modem: T.4 image structure, class 1, class 2, class 2.0, T.30 handshaking, and TIFF files. His coverage is exceptionally complete, and he does not limit himself to just the standards. Throughout the text he discusses where the real world conflicts with "how it should be" and how one works around them. One cannot wish these issues away, and discovering them early rather than later is simply golden.

Coverage of serial-port control is a bit thin, and it only addresses the PC platform, but this is such a minor nit that it does not detract from the work as a whole. UNIX developers will have to discover how to talk serial ports from some other source.

The only reason this does not receive five stars is that the sample software seems fairly pedestrian and not terribly good as an example. It seems that Andrew has sacrificed substantial performance for potential clarity, something I attribute to a likely conscious choice rather than an oversight. Since he is probably also a commercial fax developer, I suspect he didn't want to give away his secrets. I know that most of the "bit-banging" code is horrendously slow, although probably straightforward to read. In his position I may have made the same tradeoff, but the reader is left to perform these optimizations himself. Some of the optimizations are not at all obvious.

Anybody remotely involved in writing or supporting fax software should have this book. Other than my objections to the include sample code, I cannot think of a single thing that would have improved this book, other than it having it be in my library ten years ago.