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04-28-2004 01:23 PM |
Scans on a wireless handheld
Sorry to jump into the discussion months behind the times, but there are a couple of misconceptions here.
1. Standard fax format (TIFF with CCITT-4 compression at standard resolution) takes only about 20-25k per page. It would take a while to download a 40-pager over wireless, but a 10-page fax at 225K is perfectly manageable.
You are dealing with 1MB per page only if you scan to pdf format. Sadly, that is what most of the office scanners are set up to do, but the size problem could be avoided (a) for all faxes received electronically, if your GP has a network fax extension, or (b) if the secretary is tech-savvy enough to convert the greyscale pdf from the scanner back to a black-and-white tiff at fax resolution. (I couldn't find any easy way to do (b) in Adobe Acrobat 6, but I was at least able to get it to save in TIFF format, after which I used freeware IrfanView to cram it back into black-and-white with CCITT-4 compression.)
2. AcidImage Pro, mentioned earlier, is a reasonably satisfactory solution for reading the fax on a small screen. (It would be even better if they would program it to take advantage of my Tungsten T3's "landscape mode" where you use the silkscreen area as part of the display and rotate the image 90 degrees). You can zoom in and drag the your viewpoint around with the stylus, which is good enough for reading, e.g., a handwritten markup sent by fax.
Bottom line, you can do faxes via wireless, but you need to be willing to go considerably beyond commodity technology like the BlackBerry.
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