On 2019-07-17, Theo  wrote:
> In comp.sys.raspberry-pi William Unruh  wrote:
>> Yes, I know.
>> I am suggesting that he get a good printer, a good scanner and a
>> faxmodem. You know-- the Unix philosophy-- small items each of which
>> does its job well, lined together to acmplish the task?
>
> It's been a very long time, but I don't recall such a thing as a 'good'
> faxmodem.  Either they didn't work reliably due to differences in AT command
> sets, or you had to install Winmodem drivers that used your CPU to do the
> signal processing, but with Windows driver hell (and rarely on Linux).  In
> the intervening time the drivers have rotted and the hardware ended up at
> lowest-common-denominator such that I'm doubtful you can buy a new modem
> today that will work out of the box for sending faxes from Linux.

Yes, winmodems were a bit of a mess, but many were not winmodems and
they worked fine. Yes, perhaps their command sets were not exactly the
Hayes command set, but those could be sused out pretty easily. I never
had any trouble (and in fact still have on permanatly attached to one of
my computers just in case I wanted to send a fax. Still works fine on
Mageia 7 US Robotics faxmodem).
>
> The advantage of a multifunction device is that the vendor has tested the
> whole workflow - scan/send/receive/print - and all the pieces work together.

On Windows. These are far more likely to be "winmodems" and
"winprinters" (printers whichonly accept raw scanlines with nointernal
interpreter).

> As a standalone device there's no drivers to mess with if you are faxing
> from paper, and printing then scanning is the backup plan if there's
> problems with fax drivers from Linux.
>
> Theo

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05