Hack 49 Print to Fax on Windows 
Treat fax machines like remote printers instead
of remote copiers.
Faxing a
document traditionally involves two
fax machines: one that scans your document and one that prints your
document. If the document in question is already stored on a
computer, it makes more sense to print the
document from the computer to the target fax machine. This yields a
much higher-quality fax, and it is much more convenient. On a Windows
machine with a fax modem, you can install a Fax printer that behaves
like any other system printer.
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Faxes tend to look bad because the process of scanning a document
adds noise, skews text, and generally degrades the appearance.
Artwork and photographs suffer the most corruption. Printing a
document to the target fax machine, on the other hand, dispenses with
scanning. Text looks sharp, and images are preserved with dithering.
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Windows XP and Windows 2000 will create a Fax printer when you
install a fax-capable modem (Start  Setting
Control Panel Phone and Modem Options Modems
Add . . . ). Using Acrobat or your authoring program,
print your document to this Fax printer and a wizard will open. This
fax wizard asks for the recipient's phone number and
enables you to fill in a cover page. Upon completion, your modem will
dial out to the destination fax machine and send your document.
If you fax PDFs frequently, consider adding a Print to Fax item to
the PDF right-click context menu.
Windows XP and 2000:
In the Windows File Explorer menu, select Tools Folder
Options . . . and click the File Types tab. Select the PDF file type
and click the Advanced button. Click the New . . . button and a New Action dialog appears. Give the
new action the name Print to Fax. Give the action an application to open by clicking the Browse . . .
button and selecting Acrobat.exe, which lives
somewhere such as C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat
6.0\Acrobat\. Or, use Reader
(AcroRd32.exe) instead of Acrobat. Add arguments after Acrobat.exe or
AcroRd32.exe like so: "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe" /t "%1" Fax
Click OK, OK, OK and you should be done with the configuration.
To integrate fax features into your network, use HylaFAX. Visit
http://www.hylafax.org and
http://www.ifax.com, and consult
the fa.hylafax newsgroup.
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