Facsimile manager
AssigneeCanon Kabushiki Kaisha
InventorsAvraham Ron Schlank, Chet Allen Erez, Stanley H. Wong, Yu-Chen Tuan, Calvin C. Yee, Peter A. Knott
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A system for managing printing and scanning and faxing functionality of a facsimile machine via a bi-directional parallel interface with which the facsimile machine is equipped. More particularly, a facsimile manager is provided for managing image files connected with printing, scanning and faxing. In addition, printing and scanning drivers are provided by which any Windows application program can access such printing, scanning and faxing functionality.
Claims6
A communication module resident in a host computer for communicating with a processor in a facsimile machine equipped with an interface, comprising:
- a polling mechanism for polling the facsimile machine via the interface to determine whether an image file is present in a facsimile memory;
- an image buffer into which the communication module stores image files retrieved from the facsimile memory via the interface based on a polling operation by the polling mechanism;
- and
- a delivery mechanism for delivering the retrieved image to an application, which executes in the host computer,
- wherein the communication module interrogates the retrieved image file to identify the retrieved image as a scanned-in image or a received-fax image and to identify the application for delivery.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.