Scott Burdman writes about Kevin's request for a faxing solution:

> It appears that you found a satisfactory solution.  I recall a thread some
>  time ago to which Wirt Atmar posted his enthusiastic endorsement of
>  fax-capable Postscript printers (as part of his understandably enthusiastic
>  endorsement of his company's fine product QueryCalc  =8) ).

I purposefully didn't respond to Kevin's request. My enthusiasm for the
PostScript faxing option hasn't diminished. Unfortunately, however, it appears
to be a dying option. It is one of those situations where the far superior
technological solution is not going to win out.

PostScript fax represented only a $300 additional cost over and above the
price of a standard laser jet printer -- but the printer had to be designed to
accept a fax modem. Only NEC, Panasonic and Apple designed PostScript printers
that were capable of PS fax. But when you have the right equipment, it is
nothing less than a spectularly simple solution that allows graphics (in full
color), not at fax resolutions, but at that of the receiving printer, a
transmissions speeds significantly faster than normal faxes -- while being
fully compatible with standard G3 faxes, if need be.

NEC and Panasonic have, for the most part, withdrawn from the laser printer
market, leaving it primarily to just HP, Apple, IBM and a few others.

Two years ago when I first noticed Apple's support of PS fax slippling I found
the people in the Austin division of Apple responsible for PostScript in
Apple's printers and talked to many of them several times. I encouraged them
both in e-mail and voice conversations to talk to 20 or so of our heaviest
users of Apple's PS fax printers and sent them a list of users (Adager is the
only one on HP3000-L list that you would likely know). All of these people are
(and have been) truly enthusiastic about the quality of faxing solution that
PS fax represented. I have been on the "wrong" side of other similar decisions
within large corporations before and found that logic and persistence
sometimes do work. But it didn't work at Apple.

The core of the problem is that Apple is a dying company -- and I've
unfortunately come to the conclusion that I don't think that they can pull it
out anymore. If they are to survive at this eleventh hour, they're going to
have to rapidly switch over and become a hardware manufacturer, supporting NT
and 95/98 primarily and Macs only secondarily. But I doubt that they're going
to do that -- and because of that, I don't give Apple five more years.

HP, on the other hand, never adopted PS fax as an option (even though Rene Woc
of Adager took it upon himself to locate the people at the HP Boise printer
division and browbeat them a little bit about the quality of PS fax). It is a
PostScript-only solution -- and that would clearly be an anathema to HP, who
sees PCL as their "premiere" printing language.

Although the story's actually a little bit longer and more complicated, that's
much of the reason that I didn't respond to Kevin's request. What each of our
active customers are doing in the face of this discontinuance is buying two or
three extra PS fax-capable printers and simply storing them. A solution
doesn't go away simply because the vendor says it does. We'll still get
another 10 years out of the available hardware -- and by that time, there's
good reason to believe that fax will not likely still be a common interchange
medium. It is slow and cumbersome by comparison to what could be imagined for
e-mail.

Wirt Atmar