Anyone tried talking to a fax modem with a PIC?  I'm interested
in taking ascii character strings and sending them to some procedure that
would treat a remote fax machine as a simple character printer.  Ideally,
I'd pass a pointer to a string, the line of text would be transmitted (or
buffered for transmission) and return.  It seems like an approach similar
to old discrete logic CRT terminals (like the old ADM-1) could be used
where a table contains several bytes for each character.  One byte would
represent one scan line for that character.  The PIC would just index
through the string as a scan line is being sent, look up the approriate
bit pattern for that character for the line being transmitted, then send
the bit pattern on.
        I think I've heard that much of the compression on fax machines
is just run length encoding along horizontal lines.  Seems this wouldn't
be to hard to write.  I'd guess that we'd scan through the line of text
as described above, generating the RL encoded bits and dumping them in a
buffer to send to the modem.
        But...  my fax exposure is kinda limited!  So, anyone done any of
this?

Thanks!

Harold