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The Age (http://www.theage.com.au) is a major Australian newspaper. Listed below is how The Age successfully integrated ProtoFax into their production house as a feature for their advertisers. 

The facility they set up is for advertisers who make up their ads and send them into the newspaper electronically to confirm that they have been correctly processed. The advertiser's production house makes up the ad, sends it (as an EPS file) into the newspaper, where it is RIPPed ready for publication and filed into the SQL database. The production house can then review the ad on-screen using the browser, and request a faxed hard copy to be sent back from the paper via ProtoFax. ProtoFax is used by the production house as the last stage in a closed-circuit loop, to verify that the ad will publish correctly.

The Age runs a SQL database on an NT 4.0 server with browser access via IIS and ASP. The database holds details of ad bookings for the newspaper and also a BMP bitmap picture of each ad which is produced by PostScript RIPS. From the browser, a user can find the ad in the database and display the ad preview on screen. Users are located all over the country and access the database via the Internet.

And now users can fax the ad details. The user fills in a fax number - either to a machine in their own office - or to any arbitrary number, and hits SEND. ProtoFax, running on a separate fax server back at the head office sends out the fax. They implemented the Scanning directory feature with its conversion from HTML to fax. 

“This is a great approach. I haven’t seen any other product which converts HTML format to fax output,” says Brian Anderson, technology consultant for The Age.

Lastly, they made good use of the ability to map user names to different fax resolutions.  They didn’t want to resample the BMP files but they vary greatly in size. A single column ad is only 100 pixels wide, and a full page ad is 1200 pixels wide. The problem was how to fit both options into the width of a fax page, with the ad being a reasonable readable size.

The Age solved this by setting up two ProtoFax users - Bigad and Smallad. Bigad is mapped to 200 dpi and Smallad is mapped to 100 dpi. When the user hits the send key, the ASP reads the width of the ad from the SQL database. If its 6 columns or more, they put Bigad as the sender. If it's less than 6 columns they put Smallad as the sender.

ProtoFax therefore outputs the ad at either 200 dpi or 100 dpi as a function of the ad width.

In conclusion, Brian Anderson states, “Great product. Easy to use, easy to configure, and easy to do just what we wanted at the ASP end.”