
Windows Fax and Scan - tosh
https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/1275585518789513216
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kulor
Reminds me of hidden nuggets like Apple's Preview.app ability to add
signatures to PDFs by scanning a photo using webcam or using your trackpad.
When I tell people about this one feature, there's always a sigh of
frustration that they've been printing out docs, signing them and then re-
scanning them or using expensive dedicated tools.

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kyriakos
Whats fantastic about this is how much Microsoft backwards compatibility
extends. Fax is not a common use case in 2020 it could have been a separate
application (even for an extra charge) but in order not to break the workflow
of people upgrading its kept alive and bundled.

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pjmlp
You would be surprised, in some jurisdictions apparently sending a Fax is more
legal binding than an email with the same scanned data, so...

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grvdrm
Agree completely. Faxing is alive and well in 2020.

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patentatt
Also: the new-ish Windows "Scan" app will scan to PDF, which the "Windows Fax
and Scan" app couldn't. Perfectly servicable for periodic light use, and you
don't have to install whatever kludge came with your cheap multifunction
printer/scanner.

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compsciphd
there are many applications that Microsoft have included with windows that are
very well thought out.

Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) was just an app on top of XP/Vista/7
(though unchanged in 7, and then killed), but was is still so loved by those
who use it that they figured out how to extract it from Win7 and install it on
Win10.

It was honestly the best media center experience I've ever used on a PC (Tivo
might be better in hardware, but never had one and it puts ever other setup
box from a cable company to shame). It's simply a shame that it wasn't used by
enough users that microsoft stopped developing it and effectively killed it.

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WorldMaker
The impression I got was MCE was killed not because few users were using it,
but that it took power users to use it. Efforts like Windows Home Server
mostly just proved that average consumers didn't want to run and configure a
server environment in their home. Very rarely did people trying to use the MCE
have the hardware they needed to support all of its features well.

That's why so much of the media control efforts got pushed to Xbox because at
least with the Xbox they could control more of the hardware directly. (Then
those efforts were sabotaged in the early days of the Xbox One by bad press,
which was a terrible shame because they had a lot of great ideas half-
executed.)

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fuzzfactor
A couple decades ago laptops & smartphones were still out of reach for
students and most business people didn't need them either, so they were much
less popular.

Land lines were still almost universal, even though they have always been
somewhat expensive. The Bell telephone monopoly was required to subsidize
residential lines by charging higher prices for business customers.

Broadband internet was still uncommon and dial-up was still spreading fast. By
2001 most Windows PCs had built-in phone modems easily sending and recieving
faxes as files over any convenient land line wall jack without need for a fax
machine, using the Windows XP Faxing & Scanning routine not much differently
than back under W9x, when laptops were much more rare and usually needed
peripheral modems.

A scanner was only needed for faxing pieces of paper which you did not have in
a printable Windows file format, and a Windows printer was only needed when
you wanted pieces of paper from the fax files you received.

Printing apps, like Word, Excel, or Acrobat could select Windows fax output as
if it was a printer and it would call your target phone number and print on
their machine, retrying if the line was busy, and recalling at intervals if
needed. Regardless if the target fax number had a real fax machine connected
or another PC modem set for fax-receive mode.

Of course all of this was available for DOS before Windows became popular,
using third party software, it's just the kind of thing office people wouldn't
want to do without if the electronics is the least bit capable.

And the real smartphones, which were already disappearing before the arrival
of iPhones and other touchscreen models, had built-in analog phone modems.
When you connected the phone to your laptop using IR, USB or the later
Bluetooth, then Windows drivers were installed including a virtual COM port.
The modem in the phone would then connect to the PC COM port and behave
similar to the first external phone modems, as the modems were designed to
interace the COM port on the back of an IBM PC or mainframe to an ordinary
telephone line.

Before cellular carriers offered a data plan you could still dial-up to AOL
and get on the web to browse or email, or directly call or receive calls from
fax machines. Anywhere you had cellular service and battery power.

As for Gravis, I would hope the old DOS drivers for Gravis joysticks of the
'80's are still there in Windows for when you plug in a soundcard having an
analog joystick/midi port. Naturally this had some of the most useful settings
for non-Gravis joysticks . . .

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dandanio
If there was a way to interface it with a SIP provider (or a T.38) (in a
similar way to iaxmodem?) it would make it ideal.

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ktpsns
I've seen this software since it's advent in Windows vista, but I could never
ever do anything useful with it. It could not even take a simple TWAIN scan.
And if it did, it was impossible to export the image in a suitable format.
Something which virtually _every_ image editor on Windows with TWAIN
functionality (even Paint, IIRC) could do easily.

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Nextgrid
I’d like to bring attention to the UI of this app. It’s fucking beautiful, it
has a certain style/personality and isn’t an empty whitespace horror show that
takes over your entire screen to display 2 lines of text.

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hadrien01
I don't agree in this case, the Windows Scan app [0] contains all the features
you'd need from a scanner app in a clear interface. It's like the hidden scan
utility from macOS, for simple cases like scanning one you don't need a
complicated app with a menu.

[0] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-
scan/9wzdncrfj3pv](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-
scan/9wzdncrfj3pv) (from Windows 8 and still downloadable for Windows 10)

~~~
Nextgrid
In my opinion, just the icon of that new app is by itself enough to prove my
point.

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tyingq
It's not free, but I use Anveo for faxes. $2/month for a US VoIP line, and
it's cheap and reliable.
[https://www.anveo.com/developers/features.asp?code=faxinout](https://www.anveo.com/developers/features.asp?code=faxinout)

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IIAOPSW
I vaguely remember this existing from the early 2000s.

That said, I recently decided to look into the fax machine protocol because
there's a surprisingly large amount of legacy use in Japan and it seems like
there's a good market to replace it with an app. You wouldn't even need to use
VoIP because the hardware literally has a phone connection. In my research I
found an early stack overflow thread from the 2010s where I learned that the
thing protecting the fax industry is a ton of obtuse standards that require
payment to access. What little documentation I did find came from an obscure
public information server on the ITU website. Apparently there are 3
generations of protocol. The first generation worked like scan lines in a
television except the carrier frequency was audible and it was very slow scan
(a few min per frame/page). The later revisions were digital in nature and
from what I understood they compress the scan into continuous regions of white
and dark. The exact compression scheme was very obtuse so that's where I gave
up. I also could not figure out the handshake part of the protocol which
happens when the call first connects. Good luck to anyone who wants to pick up
where I left off.

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rubatuga
Won’t work because of the lossy compression in voice codecs.

