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April 2005
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2005.04.19 18:55 "Re: libtiff ,is any Unicode version available?", by Andrey Kiselev
Hi Dirk, I do not think that libtiff should have any support for Unicode unless the TIFF specification will define the multibyte character types. For now all strings should be stored in the 7-bit ASCII encoding. Of course, you can use 8-bit Unicode encoding here (UTF-8), but that will be application dependent and incompatible with other apps. And, of course, you do not need any special support from libtiff to store the UTF-8 data instead of plain ASCII. All decoding/encoding work should be done by the top level application. Recent Adobe specifications (DGN) contains UTF-8 along with ASCII as an encoding for new string fields. Also there is new data type 14 reserved by Adobe to handle Unicode data, but there is no description for that new type and I do not know what encoding these new strings should use. I'm very interested in adding Unicode types to TIFF specification. It is very disappointing that I can't add comments to TIFF file in my native language. On the first look simple replacing ASCII strings with the UTF-8 ones shouldn't have any side effects, but I may be wrong. Best regards, Andrey -- Andrey V. Kiselev Home phone: +7 812 5970603 ICQ# 26871517