convertd protocol for other applications?

[Rich Graves]

I'm looking to add an email-to-fax service using HylaFAX. Out of the box, it can only send text, pdf, tiff, or postscript attachments. Rather than install desktop print-to-fax drivers or roll my own filters, I was thinking it might be possible to use Zimbra's convertd. Is this a reasonable abuse of the tool? What is convertd's network protocol?

[Rich Graves]

Also related: Bug 28047 - Need for a convertd-mon process

If that's implemented, then the protocol will likely be documented in apache logs and convertdmon perl code. :-)

In the mean time, I'm watching convertd.log for evidence of convertd failures -- it recently started getting into a state where it would answer pings from the existing convertdmon babysitter but not process jobs -- and will deal with document conversions for HylaFAX separately (possibly on the client end, though that's harder to support).