Asterisk is an Open Source PBX (or PABX)
integrating PSTN telephone lines and VOIP into a single solution,
providing all of the functionality of a high end PBX; and best of all its free!
AsterFax builds on the services provided by Asterisk to provide a full
fledged email based Fax Gateway.
What that means is that with AsterFax and Asterisk you can send faxes from your desktop using your standard email client without have to install any software on your desktop.
AsterFax can translate a normal email message into a fax message. You simply enter the destination phone number in the 'To' address, compose your email message and click send. Its that easy.
For more formal correspondence AsterFax also supports a growing number of file formats such as PDF, Tiff, Postscript, MS-Word and OpenOffice Writer. You can either attach the file to your email message or for applications such as MS-Word and OpenOffice you can fax directly from the applications by using the 'Send Email' option. The resulting email is sent as a fax message.
A fix has been applied to ensure the conversion process generates
images with a 204x196 DPI resolution.
Microsft Outlook HTML conversion issue
fixed (Bug 1516145)
Microsoft Outlook produces non-standard HTML that broke the conversion
process in previous releases. A fix has been applied to ensure the
conversion process completes normally with these HTML documents.
Exception caused by blank header and
footer templates (Bug 1517944)
In previous releases empty header and footer templates in AsterFax.xml
would cause the progresm to fail. A fix has been implemented to
accommodate blank header and footer templates in this release. Introduction of installation and
configuration scripts
AsterFax depends on a number of software packages to interact with the
Asterisk PBX and to convert various file formats into fax TIFF format.
These dependencies can make the installation process complicated.
In this release we've introduced a yum based installation script that installs all softare packages required by AsterFax without any user interaction. The installation script has been tested on trixbox and CentOS-4 deployments.
A configuration script has also be introduced to help create the AsterFax configuration file.