[scribus-dev] TIFF -- which version?

[Leonard Rosenthol]

On 7/6/12 5:09 PM, "John L. Poole" <jlpoole56 at gmail.com> wrote:

>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.

FYI: the term "Tagged Image File Format" is never mentioned once in the
actual TIFF v6 specification.  Yes, at one time, that is what TIFF meant.,
but it's a term lost in history and not actually used in the official
documentation.


>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.

TIFF has been a published specification since it was first released in the
1980's and has remained as such since 1992 when the last official version
of the specification (TIFF v6) was published by Adobe.

There are, however, various flavors of TIFF that have been standardized
(by groups such as the ISO) for use in certain vertical industries
including TIFF/IT and GeoTIFF.


>"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,

Adobe has made various changes and improvements to TIFF over time, but has
done so via TechNotes.  No revised version of the full specification has
been published (for various reasons).



>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.

BigTIFF was released about a year ago as a joint effort between the
libTIFF group and Adobe Systems.  It is supposed by a number of vendors as
well as the libTIFF project in version 4.



>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.

I would grab the latest version of libTIFF (4.x) and use that.


Leonard Rosenthol
Adobe Systems