Technical information

FORMS OVERLAY
209
Selective merging
Under certain circumstances, you may need to extract selected pages from one received fax file and merge them with
a second file to create a new output file that can then be faxed from VSI-FAX. In this instance you would use the
merge option of the vtifftool utility, which will allow you to select specific pages from multiple files and merge
them into a single document.
This example begins with three multi-page files, file1.tif (page F1), file2.tif (page F2) and file3.tif
(page F3). A new file combine.tif will comprise pages 2 and 5 from file1.tif, pages 3 through 6 from
file2.tif and pages 2, 4, 5, and 6 from file3.tif.
file1.tif file2.tif file3.tif combine.tif
The combine.tif output file is created by entering the following on a single line:
vtifftool merge -E fine -o combine.tif file1.tif:2,5 file2.tif:3-6 file3.tif:2,4-6
Notice that combine.tif has been created, which contains pages from file1.tif, file2.tif,and
file3.tif arranged in the order was specified. The combine.tif file can now be faxed with VSI-FAX like any
other faxable file.
Creating electronic business forms
Before you begin converting your business forms into electronic image files, organize these forms in a page
sequence for later reference. You can either scan or fax the forms to create the overlays. These methods are
described in:
Manual fax scanning
Scanner support
Note
You must consolidate your forms into a single file and maintain the original page order as they are converted to a
TIFF image file.
Manual fax scanning
Collect your forms together in the proper page sequence, and fax them to your fax server. View the received fax file
to confirm that each page is intact and aligned correctly. You can expect a slight shrinkage (about 1/6 inch) of the
scanned image versus the original document due to the scan line rendering. This is a normal occurrence with any
faxed document. The slight shrinkage should not matter because the size of the text overlays will be in proportion to
the original document.