The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : The Facts on Faxing: Sending and Receiving With Your PC Is Definitely a Mixed Bag

You may not even know it, but there’s a good chance your computer has its own fax machine: Most PCs these days come with modems, and most modems can be used to send and receive faxes.

Faxing with a PC is something of a mixed bag. For certain uses, fax modems are somewhere between inconvenient and completely useless. But for other applications they’re actually much better than a regular fax machine--and remember, you’ve probably already bought the PC fax.

For starters, fax modems are terrific for sending any documents created with your word-processing program or other software. When you’re ready to send the letter, you simply select the fax modem as your printer and “print” the letter to the remote fax machine. Computer faxes look a lot better than those sent by the traditional method, because they never have to go through the degradation inherent in printing and scanning. It’s as if the fax machine on the other end were a remote printer for your PC.

A PC fax can also be useful for sending lots of faxes at once if you buy fancy software--such as WinFax Pro--that includes a broadcast capability. Shortly after my last book came out, I purchased a database of fax numbers of radio stations and newspapers, which I imported into WinFax Pro. I then used the program’s broadcast feature to send out notices overnight, when long-distance rates are lower. At about 10 cents per page for long-distance service, it was a lot cheaper than sending by mail, and most of the faxes arrived just fine.

This is an excellent solution for companies and organizations that need to send out multiple “form” faxes to customers or members. The software tells you if and when the fax was received, and it can be programmed to try several times if it gets busy signals or wrong numbers. However, it’s a good idea to make sure your missives are wanted before sending out multiple faxes. I, for example, don’t mind getting news releases via e-mail, but I don’t appreciate unsolicited faxes.

Now for the drawbacks of the PC fax. The most obvious and important one is that the only way to send non-computer documents--copies of receipts, newspaper clippings, photocopies of the pages of a book--is to first scan them in and then use software to merge the scanned images with your computer documents. It’s time-consuming and requires a scanner, and if you need to send a lot of faxes this way, you’re going to be much better off buying a stand-alone fax machine.

Receiving faxes via a fax modem is also problematic. The upside is that you can view them on screen and, if you choose to print, the faxes come out on plain paper, although they won’t look any better than a regular fax.

The downside is that your PC must be running and your fax software must be loaded. Most Windows and Macintosh fax programs run in the background so you can do other work while waiting for an incoming fax, but when a fax does come in, the program will take part of the computer’s attention away from whatever else you’re doing.

This may not force you to stop using your other software, but it can slow you down and, if something goes wrong, could cause your machine to shut down. If I’m on a deadline, I don’t want someone else to be able to interrupt my work by sending me a fax. That’s why I use a regular old fax machine to receive faxes. Standard machines use very little electricity, run 24 hours a day and are easy to use.

Fax modems typically come with free software such as WinFax Lite or FaxWorks, and there’s almost always a coupon encouraging you to order an upgraded “professional” version of the program. Before you send in your money, spend some time with the freebie and think about whether you really need or even want the extra features. Besides the price, these high-end programs take up a lot more disk space and memory.

Programs such as WinFax Pro or FaxWorks Pro typically cost between $99 and $130 and offer such features as optical character recognition (OCR), support for scanners, and the ability to rotate or edit incoming faxes, broadcast multiple faxes and import fax numbers from standard database files.

The OCR feature means you might be able to turn an incoming fax into a computer document that can be edited by a word-processing program. I say might because, as good as it may be, the OCR software can’t decipher faxes that are blurry or use fonts the software can’t recognize. I’ve had good luck “recognizing” computer-generated documents but very little success when people fax me newspaper or magazine articles. If someone needs to send you a document you want to keep as a computer file, you’re much better off using e-mail.

The ability to graphically edit or mark up an incoming fax is pretty silly unless you want to reuse graphics that are faxed to you. If all you want is to be able to read and file the fax, the feature has no real advantage. Other advanced features of high-end fax programs include indexing and archiving of incoming faxes, but beware: Faxes are graphic files that take up a lot of room on your hard disk.

*

Computer File welcomes your comments. Write to Lawrence J. Magid, Computer File, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053, or message magid@latimes.com on the Internet or KPVN58A on Prodigy.