What has faxing to do with printing? [LWN.net]

What has faxing to do with printing?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 10:10 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165)
Parent article: Hardware that Just Works

I don't understand associating faxing with printing on paper. Sure, as in printing, you have to produce pixels to send over a wire to some gadget, but where's the paper? Just about any modem knows how to dial and shriek at somebody else's fax machine, given some pixels. If you have a network connection, any number of services will take your pixels (or even raw text or html) and do the dialing and shrieking on your behalf.

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What has faxing to do with printing?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 10:52 UTC (Thu) by stevan (guest, #4342) [Link] (1 responses)

Indeed, yes. Corporately we have used an inbound hylafax system for the
last 7 years with no issues at all, simply directing the output to a
choice of existing laser printers, although the inbound fax can also end
up as an e-mail attachment or simply dropped into a data area.

Outbound is as straight forward, though no-one uses it these days.

I suspect our editor could have saved a penny or two by using an old modem
he's sure to have lying around. He may re-examine this when he realises
the cost of the ink cartridges... ;-)

Somehow all-in-one devices aren't unixy, are they?

What has faxing to do with printing?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 15:25 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

Somehow all-in-one devices aren't unixy, are they?

Well, as long as it works with emacs, it must be.

What has faxing to do with printing?

Posted Jan 11, 2007 11:08 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

A lot of these things started as photocopiers implemented as a scanner and a laser printer, then grew the ability to run the parts independently and do other things with them too. (After all, a fax machine needs a scanner...)

If you have a computer connected, all you *really* need is the separate scan and print components, and the machine can connect them together: but not everyone has appropriate software to do that (or the skills to write it) so it's good that the hardware device can do it on its own as well.