1993.12.23 22:29 "Trouble with fax2tiff on Sun Sparc IPX?", by Jim Hyler

Hello all,

I seem to be having difficulty getting fax2tiff to work on a Sun Sparcstation IPX. I've tried several versions from 3.0 up to 3.3beta2, all from sgi.com. In each case, "fax2tiff -2 fax2d.g3" (where fax2d is from the 3.0 picture archive also from sgi.com) works well, but "fax2tiff g3test.g3" fails, putting out many messages "Fax3Decode1D: Warning, g3test.g3: Premature EOL at scanline" and a TIFF file that, while valid, contains only "noise". I don't think there's really any problem with the file as PBMPLUS (specifically, g3topbm) handles it quite well.

So it seems as if fax2tiff is not working on the Sun for a 1-d compressed image. Has anyone run across this problem before, or have any idea what it might be?

My intent, if I can get things working, is to put raw group-3 and group-4 encoded fax data (obtained over Ethernet from a FileNet document storage server) into TIFF, and from there into imaging software. Unfortunately, I don't know anything about group 4 - what's the difference between group 4 encoding and 2-dimensional group-3 encoding, for example? What other problems lie ahead?

Finally, can somebody point me to a "TIFF Class F document" on the internet? There's a reference to it in the TIFF 6.0 spec, indicating that it's available "on-line in the same locations as this document". Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to hold true for sgi.com:/graphics/tiff, where I got the spec.

Thanks for any light you may shed.

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Jim Hyler                                          jhyler@pekka.ast.saic.com
SAIC, San Diego