================================== latex-cover.sty (was faxcover.sty) ================================== Version 1.08, 02/07/2000 R. Krienke krienke@uni-koblenz.de To know about the latest features please take a look at the release infos at the end of this document. DESCRIPTION: ------------ latex-cover.sty offers a way to create custom coverpage templates for use with the faxcover application from the hylafax distribution. The cover template ist used by faxcover when sending a fax to automatically create a coverpage with information such as the destination fax number, the receipient etc. from the template file and information supplied by sendfax. The advantage of latex-cover.sty for creating such a template compared with the possibility of changing the original faxcover.ps template file is that latex-cover.sty allows the design of the coverpage to be made in latex(2e). On the other hand the file faxcover.ps contains pure postscript making it rather difficult for a user to design a new coverpage template. Using latex-cover.sty in conjunction with latex and dvips the user can now write a plain latex file and insert commands defined in latex-cover.sty at those places where he wants to insert parameters actually filled in by faxcover when a fax is beeing send. The latex source can be comiled by latex and converted to the Postscript template file via dvips. Thats all (Please note, that the resulting ps-file is only a template so you cannot look at it directly eg by ghostview. See Installation Note below). latex-cover.sty offers the following commands to insert Variables in the template file that are replaced by actual values when a fax is beeing send. The names of the variables are similar to the names described in the man page of faxcover (the difference is that the latex command names contain no "-" and that you have to write \toperson instead of \to for the variable "to"). So if you want to insert the destination faxnumer somewhere in your coverpage simply place the latex command \tofaxnumber in the correct position of your latexfile. Here are all the command described by latex-cover.sty. You can find a description of the variables in the manpage of faxcover: \commentsX (where X ist a number starting with 1 ... ) \comments \from \toperson \fromcompany \tocompany \regarding \tolocation \tovoicenumber \fromlocation \fromvoicenumber \tofaxnumber \fromfaxnumber \pagecount \todaysdate When sending the fax you may specify \n as part of the comment string if you want a linebreak to occur at a particular point in this string. The files in the "templates" directory contain demo coverpages the user may use as a starting point for his own page. There is another command that helps you define the string to use if the page-count Variable should have the value zero. Because you probably do not want the number "0" to appear on the coverpage as the number of pages to follow. To avoid this the \pagecount macro inserts Postscript code to test the actual value. If it is zero, a "?" character is used instead of the number "0". You can change the text to appear in this case by giving a value to the tex macro \zeroPagecounterString eg: \zeroPagecounterString{unknown} BUGS: ----- There is one problem that you should know about. The main problem is, that you design a page with fax variables in latex. At that point latex has no knowlwdge about with what values the variables will be finally replaced (by faxcover). So latex does not know about the size of tex for a variable and cannot do correct formatting for the variable. So if you e.g. try to center such a variable the text in the resulting coverpage for a fax will probably not be centered. A property of dvips poses another restriction on the creation of a template with latex(2e) using faxcover.sty. The template .tex-file has to use postscript fonts in order to create a correct faxcover template. Not doing so results in the appearance of strange characters in the final coverpage. The problems arises because dvips changes the standard fontencoding vector in the resulting ps file, so that manually inserted text (from a command like \tofaxnumber etc) that relies on the standard encoding produces incorrect text to be displayed. So it is important, that the template .tex-file contains a command like \usepackage{times} or a similar psfonts package of latex. INSTALLATION: ------------ Simlpy copy the file latex-cover.sty in a directory where tex can find it. Then design your page, run latex and finally convert the dvi file to Postscript using dvips. The file lcover.tex is a demo template source. The file lcover.ps is the templatefile for use with sendfax (faxcover). Note: The resulting .ps file is always a template file you cannot look at directly by eg ghostview. This is only possible if you run faxcover with this template and view the resulting ps file (the -C option take a full path hence the `pwd`): faxcover -C `pwd`/lcover.ps -f abc -n 123 > cover.ps After this call you can look at your coverpage with eg "ghostview cover.ps". When sending a fax the faxcover run is performed automatically by hylafax. So you only have to care about this if you are designing your cover page and want to take a look at it. After you created your new templatefile you can use it best by setting the environmentvariable FAXCOVER to the pathname of your ps file. TEMPLATES: ---------- In the templates directory you will find some latex source files. You can use these files as a starting point for your own faxcover. These files are provided as is. If you have questions on a particular coverpage provided in this directory please contact the author of the corresponding .tex file. CHANGES: -------- 1.00 --> 1.01 Found Bug that caused wrong characters to appear in the final coverpage. The fix was to use postscriptfonts instead of pk-fonts from latex. For this reason the user has to use one of the ps fonts packages like "times". 1.01 --> 1.02 The was a problem when sending a fax including coverpage from winflex. Unlike the unix faxcover program winflex does not provide a postscript routine to break lines of text (used for the comments line on the coverpage). So I provided (excacly the routine used by faxcover) in my style using a different name, to prevent name clashes. I changed the name of the stylefile to be equivalent to the name of the distribution( from faxcover.sty to latex-cover.sty). You will need to change your coverpage tex files accordingly. A little bit Postscript code was added to handle page counters (number of pages to follow) with value zero. 1.02 --> 1.03 Small Bugfix: The demo template .tex file contained \today instead of \todaysdate, so the date was always the one of the day the dvi-file was created. 1.03 -> 1.04 Small Bugfix: The comment field was not correctly broken into lines. Thanks to Lorenzo M. Catucci" who found this bug and thanks to Volker Riediger who helped fixing the postscript code. 1.04 -> 1.05 Extented functionality in that the comment string may contain manually inserted linebreaks. Simply write \n in the comment string where you want a linebreak to occur in the resulting coverpage. Thanks to Thomas Kempf (tkempf@hueper.de) for idea and thanks to the hylafay team for providing the correct breakIntoLine routine. 1.05 -> 1.06 Fixed Bug in commentsX macro in latex-cover.sty. Thanks to Hans Matzen for providing the fix. 1.08 Small Fix inthe demo file. It contained \address which is only valid for susefax users, not for "standard" hylafax usage. Removed the entry so people get no error.