subject: Keep Your Workflow Digital with Online Faxing [print this page] Keep Your Workflow Digital with Online Faxing
Americans are often surprised to find out that not everyone in the world can get on the Internet, much less connect with state-of-the-art broadband speed. Even successful businesses in some parts of Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe cannot get dependable Internet service locally, and either cannot get or cannot afford cable or satellite alternatives. If you are working with a person or firm who has no Internet connection, and you need copy and/or images from them for a project you are doing together, what do you do? You call in the reserves, meaning the fax machine. Not only can you stay connected with faxes and phones, from your end you can keep your workflow digital with online faxing.
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!
