#577401 efax: fails to send ps file: can't read multi-strip TIFF files

Package:
efax
Source:
efax
Description:
programs to send and receive fax messages
Submitter:
Peter Poeschl
Date:
2010-06-24 02:57:05 UTC
Severity:
important
#577401#5
Date:
2010-04-11 10:26:12 UTC
From:
To:
Any attempt to send a postscript file fails with

    efax: 38:50 Error: can't read multi-strip TIFF files
    efax: 38:50 Error: missing offset to TIFF data
    efax: 38:50 done, returning 2 (unrecoverable error)
it seems, that efax doesn't like the tiff files generated by ghostscript
anymore (or deeper: The problem is really that 'efax' is a non-compliant TIFF reader).

The workaround would be for efax to call gs with an additional option

  -dMaxStripSize=0

A tiff file manually created with

    gs -q -sDEVICE=tiffg3 -dNOPAUSE -dMaxStripSize=0 \
       -sOutputFile=sample.%03d sample.ps </dev/null

was sent without problems.


Further information:

ii  ghostscript                  8.71~dfsg-3 The GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF interpreter
ii  gs-common                    8.71~dfsg-3 Dummy package depending on ghostscript
ii  gsfonts                      1:8.11+urwcyr1.0.7~pre44-4 Fonts for the Ghostscript interpreter(s)
ii  libgs8                       8.71~dfsg-3 The Ghostscript PostScript/PDF interpreter Library
#577401#10
Date:
2010-06-24 02:43:40 UTC
From:
To:
Thank you for your insightful bug report.

Like you, I use gs through efax and originally got
the error

    efax: 41:38 Error: missing offset to TIFF data

I tried adding -dMaxStripSize=0 as an option to gs.

    gs -q -sDEVICE=tiffg3 -r204x196 -dNOPAUSE -dMaxStripSize=0 -dSAFER -sOutputFile=file.ps.%03d -sPAPERSIZE=letter file.ps

but gs gave me different errors.

It says:

    TIFFWriteScanline: tiffg3:
    In place update to compressed TIFF images not supported..
    TIFFWriteScanline: tiffg3:
    In place update to compressed TIFF images not supported..
    TIFFWriteScanline: tiffg3:
    In place update to compressed TIFF images not supported..
    TIFFWriteScanline: tiffg3:
    [repeated 4,312 times]

I'm using version 8.71~dfsg2-3 of ghostscript and libgs8.

I submitted a bug report against ghostscript.

Thanks,
Kingsley