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October 2000
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2000.10.06 02:20 "Re: Old-style JPEG and HP 9100C Digital Sender", by Tom Lane
Rex_Jolliff@notes.ymp.gov writes: > If the worst thing that I had to deal with were compliant V6JETs, > that would be cause for celebration. Of course, there are vendors > which do not even produce files consistant with the V6 spec. That would be all of them. I have hardly ever seen a type-6 TIFF that wasn't demonstrably non- conformant with one or another of the unambiguous portions of the TIFF 6.0 JPEG spec. Add to that the fact that other parts of the spec are sufficiently ambiguous that it's hard to say what *is* correct, and it becomes obvious that type-6 is not a standard at all. For each vendor who claims to emit it, a would-be decoder must figure out what their particular variant is and write special code to support that variant. This is not a standard, it's just a Tower of Babel. As for the fact that TTN2 is not official, the blame for that lies directly with Adobe management. Steve Carlson was ready to put out TTN2 as part of a TIFF spec revision when Adobe bought out Aldus and immediately defunded TIFF spec maintenance. Adobe have been suppressing a ready-to-go TIFF 7.0 spec for quite a few years now. I have heard well-informed opinions that Adobe see TIFF as a competitive threat to their proprietary PDF spec, and are therefore doing their level best to kill TIFF by not-so-benign neglect. Bottom line: the alleged maintainers of TIFF have zero credibility with those who've been paying attention, and if there weren't a small problem of copyright and trademark there would have been a public-domain TIFF spec update by now. In the meantime, the argument that TTN2 has no official standing cuts no ice except with pointy- hair types. regards, tom lane organizer, Independent JPEG Group