• Vladkar@lemmy.world
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    2 年前

    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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      2 年前

      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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      2 年前

      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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      2 年前

      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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        2 年前

        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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          2 年前

          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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            2 年前

            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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        2 年前

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