Supply your project partners in, say, the Ivory Coast with your online fax number. With this, they can fax you the conceptual rendering of the new car, building or circuit board, at a very decent resolution of at least 200 dpi (dots per inch). With most online fax services, your pages will arrive to you as attachments to an e-mail, and will be most likely be in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) or the JPEG (Joint Photographers Expert Group) file format. You will have a reader application supplied by your online fax service, but if you receive PDFs you can open them in Adobe Reader for an initial review. Adobe Reader, however, does not allow much editing of the file, for which you need either Acrobat Standard or Pro, each carrying a cost that is not inconsequential. However, there are lower-cost (and free) alternatives.

What you will need

For Macintosh users, OS X has a very powerful program called Preview that displays PDFs and other image formats, and allows resizing, color touchup, conversion to other file types, sticky notes and other editing. In addition, the freeware programs GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) and Seashore are very capable.

On Windows PCs, there are scores of free image editors, including a version of GIMP, along with Pixia (a Japanese import with a growing cult following), XnView and PixelToobox. There are plenty of open source applications for Linux, of course, so no matter what platform you (or your partners) are working on, you can get set up quickly and on the cheap, too.

What to do

What you want to do is open the attached file with one of these graphics programs. If the incoming fax has copy and images, you can cut or copy the image and make a new, separate file out of it, or crop the fax down to the image and discard the rest of it. However, if you need that text, and want to use it in a document, you have two choices. You can retype it, which is the fastest way as long as it is short, perhaps a few hundred words or so. (This article is about 500 words to right here, so if it seems like a lot, and you are not the best typist, move on to the next option.) If it is longer than that, then your best bet is to use the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software that came with your office all-in-one or your flatbed scanner.

If you do not have any OCR software, never fear. Microsoft may have already saved you, since Microsoft Office comes with something called the Document Imaging application. It is located in the Microsoft Office Tools folder, and is accessed from the Start menu via Menu/Microsoft Office/Microsoft Office Tools/Microsoft Office Document Imaging. It is somewhat limited because it only handles TIFF or MDI formats, but the graphics tools above can easily convert your attachment to a TIFF file to use with this cool tool. If you do not have Microsoft Office, the freeware community will once again come to your rescue. You can get FreeOCR and SimpleOCR and a number of other capable programs at no cost.

Bottom line

Once you learn how to convert what is called machine text into editable copy, you will have no problem keeping your incoming fax documents entirely in the digital environment no matter what you need, whether images or text. Some of the OCR programs need a little tweaking, and you should always read every word of a converted document as a lowercase-L may look like a T or even the numeral 1. Once your software is trained to recognize the unique shapes of the letters coming from your far-flung partners, however, the conversion will be much faster.

Whether you need the pictures of the new product or the description your African or Asian partners wrote, you can keep both in the digital workflow by judicious use of good old fax technology and free software tools. As long as you can connect with someone via fax, you can retain the modern advantages of working with those great, flexible and easily stored ones and zeroes. Binary is your friend!

About the Author: Metro Hi Speed is a leader in email fax solutions for any sized business. Less expensive and more reliable than traditional fax services – you’ll enjoy the convenience and well as the cost. Visit us today for more information on our small business and corporate fax solutions.

A fax machine is a combination of several technologies, actually. For outgoing messages, there is a scanning step followed by a transmission step, while for incoming messages there is a translation step followed by a printing step. So, as you can see, there are scanning, transmission and print technologies all working together to make the communication possible. The fax machine shares operational characteristics with scanners, copiers, printers and telephones. In fact, the fax machine itself is a convergence of (mostly) analog technologies. With the advent of online faxing, this mature technology becomes part of the ongoing digital communications convergence, too.

One format used many ways

Computers, of course, are digital devices. Once these became widespread, it was essential to translate things (text, sound, etc.) into a form that the computer’s digital circuitry could work with, and that meant converting to binary languages with ones and zeroes. This is called analog-to-digital, or A/D, conversion. One digital file could represent an annual report while another file, in the same directory list on the same computer, could be digitized music. Both will be translated back in to the analog form of printed characters and sound waves in the reverse process, digital-to-analog or D/A conversion. We can then read the words and hear the music once again. The major job that computer chips do is to perform these conversions and present us with words, images, sounds and motion graphics that we can then edit, add to, delete, change and distribute.

To send an online fax to a fax machine, your computer will convert a word processing document into an analog pattern of signals that can be received and reproduced by the telephonic circuits in the receiving machine. In the other direction, a fax machine will send an analog file that the computer (or, in some cases, a fax server or other setup) will convert to a digital file that you computer can access, edit, display or print. The A/D and D/A conversions happen millions, even trillions, of times a day around the world, with every kind of media imaginable.

Convergence and miniaturization

Convergence means that similar digital formats, for words and music and images, can be accessed today by a single device. The original analog cell phones could handle only analog signals, meaning voice calls. There was no way to receive or display a text message or a photo, much less a video clip with a soundtrack. Now that all of these kinds of media can be digitized, a single device with support for sound (as in speakers/headphones) and images (a color screen) can easily receive, store, display and even forward the media, quickly and cheaply. In addition, connecting the cell phone, wirelessly or otherwise, to a computer allows you to copy those files and then use them immediately with powerful editing and presentation programs.

Digital technology has provided a way to bring all media to common platforms, and in doing so it has resulted in both convergence and miniaturization. The image file may print out at 8 x 11 inches in full color, but to your digital device it is still just a file being stored on a PC hard drive, a cell phone’s flash memory or a CD/DVD disc. The 45 minutes of music on your favorite new album can be compressed into mp3 files totaling only about 45MB in size, and you can save thousands of albums on the average iPod or other music player. Fax messages are now the same kind of animal if you go the online fax route, which has no downside to speak of but a lot of potential to help you in your day-to-day work.

Bottom line

Apple’s iPhone is a great example of digital convergence. It is the most modern of modern devices, and integrates digital files of all kinds into a single device. It is a phone, a movie player, a music machine, a note-taker, a videoconferencing device and an all-around gauge of where the digital road is taking us. And, yes, you can use it for faxing, too. Now that’s convergence!

About the Author: Metro Hi Speed is a leader in email fax solutions for any sized business. Less expensive and more reliable than traditional fax services – you’ll enjoy the convenience and well as the cost. Visit us today for more information on our small business and corporate fax solutions.