I think including an OCR friendly font will help out a bunch. There's OCR-B which is found below bar codes and on passports, and E-13B which is found on checks. E-13B in particular should be useful, as it's designed for magnetic scanning of characters, potentially even allowing for skipping the OCR step entirely and instead use signal processing tricks. E:also using something like S record or Intel Hex should allow for mostly keeping the spirit of faxing your code alive while allowing for sending/receiving arbitrary characters.

Kind of makes me sad to think that there are long-term Linux users who didn't know that `echo` was also a `bash` built-in. Although, it sounds like a BS challenge to say you can't do the most obvious thing that everyone who expects some consistent behavior from `echo` should do, which is to just use `/bin/echo`. Also, I'm pretty sure most POSIX conformant programs use a double dash to indicate the end of argument processing as the single dash is commonly used for informing the program that standard input is the file to read. Sure, exceptions such as `echo` exist, but it doesn't read input from files or write output to files. If you were to complain about `ffmpeg`'s non-conformance with command line options, then I'd agree.

Just for fun?

thats gay :3

You know what, with OTCC, you can fax yourself a C compiler. You may want to choose the deobfuscated version, it's still faxable.

公務員がまだfaxを使う理由

What's the number so I can fax you some malware to run? Also I need that burger phone

with printer ink being the most expensive liquid, you can finally recreate AWS infinite loop costs at home

oh yeah baby we’ve almost made it back to punch cards

Other than you printed it on a 8x11 in piece of paper this is exactly how you did computing in 1957 on a 1401.

11:00 If the output fax was just the input fax, you could send a quine and have it forever print the same thing. (A quine is a source code file which, when compiled and run, outputs its own text. Yes, C can do this.)

next time you do this if it's for something small skip the annoying OCR stuff and use GPT4-o or LLaVA. Those models are great at structured data extraction!

thats a really cute pride spider sticker!

i haven't downloaded it, i haven't had a windows box in 20 years, and i've already made the switch to full time

punch cards punch cards punch cards i dunno if tesseract can handle that but punch cards punch cards punch cards

If you make it public you should call the service cFax (ceefax reference).

Is there some kind of tool to automatically fix many ocr errors that result in compiler errors by replacing the char causing the problem by a lookalike until it works?

Hylax sounds lame, have you found any other alternatives?

Perhaps a language like brainfuck with fewer characters might work better here. And be more ridiculous

Love it :) Fax resolution is odd: 204 x 98 DPI 1 bit/px. "Fine" setting would do squarer pixels = explains your odd rescaling. Perhaps dont rescale for better OCR. Encoding was a crude run length limit scheme: eg 15 white px,2 blk,19 white etc to fill a line...then move to the next line... For a while, scammers realised this and would send out faxes by bulk electronic methods...with a "competition" on and a detailed pixelly image. Fax Back with the answer box ticked and your contact details written on to win a prize. Many companies were charged for this as the fax back number was one of those £1/min. ...and the optical scanning process made the return transmission reallllllyyyyy sssllloooowwwwww.

we got compiler fax before gta 6

You can make Hylafax working with FreeSWITCH or Asterisk. A phone number can be purchased from many of voip providers. You need to make sure the number provider support t.38 as transmitting FAX over voice codec like g.711 isn't reliable.

This opens the door to software development for a lot of Germans

Finally german governments are able to use C ;p /s

dumb but cool.

Maybe you should check out the Piston code execution engine, and get this working securely for a ton of other languages. That sounds cool!

Fax-GPT next 😅

Fax-GPT

Awesome stickers!

I was gonna ask if you could try handwriting your code. But I guess the OCR is already buggy enough with typesets.

Aw the enby heart spider

It'd be cool if you could add an option to send the resulting ELF binary in a barcode or hex printout instead

*sees lgbtq flag and programing together* "TRANSSS" *sees NB spider on the printer* "ha i was right"

It would be interesting if you could use some sort of LLM to sort of "auto-repair" incorrectly formatted code if it errors out, that way you don't need to fiddle with the OCR as much

in the middle of the night your fax machine starts ringing and the printout just reads "SEGMENTATION FAULT [11]"

Couldn't you use "efax" linux command instead of hylafax? I've made similar setup with RPi receiving image over Bluetooth and printing it over simulated 12v phone line to a fax machine. I was sending the image with 'efax' cli command.

I have to say. Hamburger phone really sells the video!

finally, a use for all that code they ask us to handwrite in computer science exam papers!! 😂❤

A small LLM could probably help with the ocr. Something like "The following source code might contain ocr artifacts, remove them if present" as a promt

Finally Germans will be able to code too.

Ive used Tesseract in the past and was surprise it was working just fine when you first mentioned it... i stand corrected... lots of post process was required

You see, the solution to your OCR problems is to have users convert their C code into a QR code, which has stuff like error correction built in, allowing for a much lower failure rate for me to fork-bomb-by-fax your machine!

brings me back

Seems like a waste of paper and slow too. Wouldn't it be better to just compile it locally? What is the benefit of this system?

I wonder if you could add some sort of error correction for the scanning

Thank you for not inserting airhorn sounds here

This is a really cool Idea! I love that you actually did it <3

“plus gcc for compilation” not clang? it is alpine.. haha

massive W

this is how the goverment works