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RalphS007Flag for United States of America

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PHP to Fax

I have a client in the field of selling medical supplies that has an all digital fax infrastructure.  They want to have a feedback form on their website coded in php/html that when you click the submit button it goes straight to a fax machine.  How would i create code for something like that.
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Ray Paseur
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What a great question!  I am going to guess that the fax is non-technical -- in other words, the information presented over the digital fax is common language and images, not bar codes or OCR.  I think the first thing I would do is reduce the feedback to a black-and-white PDF.  You might find the PHP class FPDF to be helpful for this part.  It might not be necessary, but I would plan for that.

Then I might use this service.  They have been around a while and are fairly well thought-of.
http://www.interfax.net/en/dev/php
I am guessing that the feedback form goes back to your clients office ?

If so, would sending an email to a central email (group) address be a better option, serving a few purposes, mainly the cost of running the fax, printing supplies etc (am waving the "green" flag)..

Also the data gained from the email could be processed online (intranet) which in turn could give improved analysis of customer feedback .
waving the "green" flag -- Love it!

I agree with maeltar that FAX is kind of 20th century automation.  Most of the world has moved beyond that.  If you can get your clients to move forward it will be a great benefit to them.
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ASKER

what i know is that it's an all digital platform and that if there's a way to setup the fax# to send to email it might help.
So the people who want the feedback form have the fax machine ?

Also, need to know more than "all digital platform", if you could provide more info it would help with a solution...
To my understanding they have a all-in-one copier that includes a fax machine feature and a database possibly oracle.  And they want the submission to go to the oracle database and be stored digitally there as well as print to the fax machine as well.
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Matt
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