Creating a "fax printer" in Windows with YajHFC

The following howto was created for Windows 2000/XP, but you should be able to create a fax printer using similar steps with other versions of Windows, too.

1. Download and install YajHFC (i.e. copy yajhfc-X_Y_Z.jar to a folder on your harddisk).

2. Download Redmon from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/ and install it (execute setup.exe)

3. Go to control panel -> printers, select "Add printer"

4. In the wizard, choose "Add local printer", uncheck the checkbox for automatic detection of Plug&Play printers and click "Next"

5. Choose "Create new port", choose "Redirected Port" from the combo box and click "Next"

6. Enter a name for the new port or accept the default and click "OK"

7. Choose "Apple LaserWriter 16/600 PS" as model and finish the rest of the wizard.

8. Right-click the newly created printer and choose "Properties" from the context menu

9. Select the "Ports" tab, select the redirected port and click "Configure"

10. In the appearing dialog, set the following settings:

    
    • "Redirect this port to the program": Enter the path to your java executable (i.e. java.exe or javaw.exe)
    • "Arguments for this program are":
      • If YajHFC should stay open after submitting the fax job, enter: "-jar [path to yajhfc.jar] --stdin --background"
      • If YajHFC should close after submitting the fax job, enter: "-jar [path to yajhfc.jar] --stdin"
    • Make sure the "Run as User" checkbox is checked.

11. Close the open dialogs with "OK"/"Close"

12. Enjoy your new fax printer. ;-)

Notes:

Sometimes some Java versions seem not to be able to detect the location of the user profile directory correctly when Java gets launched by RedMon. The result of this usually is that YajHFC's configuration gets saved in C:\.yajhfc instead of C:\Documents And Settings\USERNAME\.yajhfc (also see the corresponding FAQ entry).
To work around this problem you can use a wrapper script which can be downloaded here.
To install it please follow these instructions (also included in the ZIP file).

Created by: Jonas Wolz

Last modification: Monday, 12-Dec-2016 11:51:50 CET