• Vladkar@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I recently had to fax a document to the government, which meant I had to print the thing, then pay $12 at OfficeMax to send it. Absolute bedlam.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      From time to time I have to sign a form that specifically says “Print and sign, no digital signatures”

      I use Adobes “draw a signature” feature to do my squibble, then place it on the signature line taking at least a little care to make it look handwritten (So like a portion of my signature is dipping below the line etc.). Finally I print to PDF (Even if it is already PDF) and email that or use one of those fax apps if fax is absolutely required.

      I haven’t had any such forms rejected (Well, at least not for “improper signature” or whatever) and I’ve been doing it on forms for well over a decade now lmao

    • topher@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Same happened to me two years ago. I signed up for a 30-day trial with one of those e-fax companies and after the doc was sent I cancelled. To be fair, my work had an account with that service so I already knew about it - but I knew I didn’t want to pay a buck a page just to pay my taxes… Hopefully you don’t need this advice in future but maybe it can come in handy just in case!

    • MxM111@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      Why you did not use an app that can take a photo of a document? Even if you do not want to use free trial, they are still cheaper than $12 per single payment (usually a week of use).

      • Vladkar@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Honestly, I’m not familiar enough with the world of faxing to know which apps are trustworthy, especially since the documents contained personal information. If I ever have to send another fax, I’ll consider it.

        • MxM111@kbin.social
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          8 months ago

          If it is paid app with lots subscriptions, most likely it is safe (or as safe as government). The biggest problem with those if somebody else steals your login info from their system. I do not believe they hunt or store faxes themselves if you delete the document after sending.

          • renzev@lemmy.worldOP
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            8 months ago

            Just take a photo with a trusted regular camera app and then enhance it with imagemagick. I have this script, works like a charm: convert INPUT_IMAGE.jpg -colorspace gray \( +clone -blur 15,15 \) -compose Divide_Src -composite -normalize -threshold 80% OUTPUT_IMAGE.jpg. Pretty sure you can also specify multiple input images, and imagemagick can merge it into a PDF file. For joining a really large number of images into PDF files (e.g.scans of entire books), you can convert each image individually, and then pdunite them. So something like for i in *; do convert $i $i.pdf; done; pdfunite $(ls *.pdf | sort -n) output.pdf

            Apps are bloat. Reject modernity, embrace shell scripts.

      • brian@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        An app isn’t going to fax the document, though, which is where I’d assume the $12 charge is really coming.