[scribus-dev] TIFF -- which version?

[John L. Poole]

I'm going through the process of building the high watermark of Scribus 
on Windows and came across an issue regarding the Tagged Image Format 
("TIFF") standard.

A dependency for Scribus is the Sourceforge color management project 
Little Color Management System.  The Scribus build notes for Windows 
suggests that the latest version of Little CMS is acceptable, so I had 
downloaded and tried to build lcms2-2.3 and ran into problems due to 
missing header files, specifically tiff_io.h.  Within package lcms2-2. 
is a reference or dependency upon TIFF 3.9.4, so the prime mover behind 
lcms, Marti Maria,is using TIFF 3.9.4 in his release.

The Windows build for Scribus specifies TIFF 3.8.2 obtainable at 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32/files/tiff/3.8.2/.  It appears 
that for the gnuwin32 project, their high watermark is TIFF 3.8.2.

So now there is a disparity: Scribus to date has been relying on TIFF 
3.8.2 or earlier version.  Meanwhile Little CMS has adopted a later 
version of TIFF at 3.9.4.  Add to this a third wrinkle: there appears to 
be a version 4.2 of TIFF as blessed by the OSGeo project which is 
maintaining the defunct remotesensing.org web site.

The current version of the TIFF 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_Image_File_Format) libraries 
offered at http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/ (more about this site 
below) is v4.0.2 <http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/v4.0.2.html>

So I started doing some research on TIFF and learned that it is a 
proprietary standard developed by Aldus and now owned by Adobe.  Being 
proprietary, the TIFF standard is not subject to an open standards 
committee or such.  "It has been much long neglected" opines Joris Van 
Damme, a developer who follos TIFF 
http://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/faq.html.  There has not been 
much revision in TIFF recently, although there is a TIFFBIG 
specification which uses 64-bit offsets and thereforecan break the 4 
Gigabtye limitation of the TIFF's 32 bit offset standard.

It seems the OSGeo project comprising of over 160 companies and 
organizations has been promoting its flavor of TIFF and offers it 
through the remotesening.org site referenced above.

Then I have the question: does the library offered under the GnuWin 
project offer something unique for windows, or can the OSGeo library be 
compiled for windows.  This is something I'll find out, but I share this 
issue here in case someone has knowledge or an opinion about this.

What I'd like learn from this list are any opinions about TIFF that 
weigh against trying to incorporate the v4.0.2 into the dependencies and 
Scribus build?  It doesn't seem like much risk, but I thought I'd bring 
this issue to focus in this email to learn if there are any factors 
weighing against trying latter versions, varied they be, of TIFF.
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