xiaoanri wrote on Thursday, March 28, 2013:
Thank you, Rod, with the new change it does dispatch to patient document now, but the new pdf file is a blank white page. I also tried 1 and 4. I also saw on line there might be enhancements for the command to support 16 bit, will report back if any improvement.
sunsetsystems wrote on Thursday, March 28, 2013:
My guess is you’ve solved the color depth problem and the blank page is something else. Does fax_dispatch.php display your document pages correctly? If so, it would appear the tiff files are OK and the conversion to PDF is what’s failing.
xiaoanri wrote on Friday, March 29, 2013:
Rod,
the image pages are all displayed correctly in the new popup window when i try to dispatch the file, it seems to be a jpeg file if i look into the file info.
another observation is the newly generated pdf file (currently is blank) that gets dispatched to pateint document is much larger then the original file-22mb for a 2 page fax, the original pdf size was 42kb. Could this be part of the problem? it seems other people might also have the file size issue, there is actually another thread here discussing reducing the size:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openemr/forums/forum/202506/topic/6893443
the fax at our office was converted to pdf by avantfax. so i am thinking those might be potential solutions? 1- some change on the dispatch.pdf code, or adopt some relavent code from avantfax, 2-get a much simpler dispatch file, involving only transferring the pdf from fax/scan folder to patient document, however, the page selection function is lost with this approach.
or any other solutions… Thank you!
sunsetsystems wrote on Friday, March 29, 2013:
Oh yes, it creates and caches jpeg versions of the pages as well for display in the browser.
That PDF size is insane. I don’t know what that’s about, but clearly something is going wrong when it’s generated. I suggest as an experiment you undo the “-depth 8” mod and try a B&W scan. Also see what happens with original PDFs from some other source.
xiaoanri wrote on Friday, March 29, 2013:
Rod, how do i specify a B&W scan? i removed -depth 8 and replaced with “-B&W”, also tried “B&W”, they fail to generate any pages to append in the dispatch window.
sunsetsystems wrote on Friday, March 29, 2013:
Nono, I mean tell the scanner itself to scan B&W. I think most can do that?
xiaoanri wrote on Friday, March 29, 2013:
this is a success. i did scan in a 2 page tiff file black and white, 300dpi, file size 480kb, it would dispatch just as expected and the new pdf in patient document is 160kb.
sunsetsystems wrote on Friday, March 29, 2013:
That’s good news. So again, see what other settings you can tweak in the scanner to control the format of the output images. If there’s an option for 8-bit color, that would probably be good.
Also it’s more efficient if the scanner writes tiff files directly, as that way the pdf-to-tiff conversion by the dispatcher can be skipped.
xiaoanri wrote on Friday, March 29, 2013:
that came back to to question on hylafax integration, i have searched around and has not been able to locate a tutorial on this topic, so i have to install avantfax to get the faxes received by hylafax. the problem now is that avantfax converts all fax to pdf automatically… is there a way to specify in the dispatch code to generate black and white tiff file?
penguin8r wrote on Tuesday, April 02, 2013:
You can pull the faxes in directly from OpenEMR, using Avantfax actually adds more steps to the process, making it slower and more cumbersome from the end user. It’s easier if Hylafax is running on the same server as OpenEMR.
xiaoanri wrote on Tuesday, April 02, 2013:
I tried to activate hylafax support at admin-> global–>misc and put server as “localhost” (it is on the same server) and hylafax directory /var/spool/hylafax, but the fax dose not show in fax/scan folder, is there a lot more tech stuff to do here, or just a matter of setting up the right directory? I tried to find any global settings for hylafax in globals.php, was not able to find any entry.