[plug] Emailing - gotchas

[Bernd Felsche]

On Thursday 01 July 2004 13:17, James Devenish wrote:
> In message <200407011203.33627 at death.2.spammers>
> on Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 12:03:33PM +0800, Bernd Felsche wrote:
> > I write some software that accepts PCL-formatted output and
> > transforms it to PDF for emailing to other parties.

> > Unfortunately, I can no longer use the mailing wrapper program for
> > generic purposes; not without some changes to detect MIME type and
> > rename the file before attaching ... <sigh>

> I'm guessing that the following suggestions are ruled out by your
> circumstances, but things that popped into my head while reading this
> were:
>  - Couldn't you have your software write to an output file (or rename
>    its output file) with a name that ends in .pdf in the first place,
>    before reaching the mail wrapper? Then the mail wrapper would work
>    fine?

In this case; no. The mailing wrapper mails the standard input as an
attachment to the address(es) designated on the command line.

The GhostPCL does indeed create a temporary PDF, but the nature of
the application flow is that the delivery of the document takes
place in a pipeline.

This project, FWIW, is an output multiplexer that behaves in the
same way as a "printer" (lpr -equivalent command) as far as the main
enterprise applications are concerned.

Traditionally, the output contains many individual documents that
are printed to the same destination - then folded and placed in
envelopes before physical mailing.

This project is to; for each document type and addressee, either
print, email or fax the document according to each addressee's
preference; with the option of different handling for "re-prints".

Other than a few teething problems, the implementation has been
remarkably straight-forward; even the PCL formatted output that's
done by a proprietary application (Formtrap) getting mangled into
PDF.

I started off writing a lot of code and complicated application over
several weeks; then I lost the lot in a "hard disc failure"
(minor/major oops on my part). The customer was screaming for it, so
I backed off a few steps from what I was doing and realized how to do
it in a handful of sub-hundred-line programs; written in an
afternoon.

The mailing wrapper is but one delivery method. Others are to send
to fax; to print on any accessible printer, or any other "method"
that takes an arbitrary input, transforms it to a suitable output
format for that delivery method (and possibly destination) and then
initiates delivery.

"Simple" program; complex function. It's simple because it's based
on the Unix paradigm of tool-building. Re-use of existing building
blocks.  I try to remain consistent with that.

>  - Alternatively, if you were to save the PDF files in binary format,
>    without changing their names, I'm guessing that nail should send it
>    as application/octet-stream (instead of text/plain). Adobe even has a
>    comment in their PDF Reference:

<snip>

PDF is sacred territory as far as I'm concerned.
I don't dabble with the output unless it's unavoidable.

-- 
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