LibTiff Mailing List
TIFF and LibTiff Mailing List Archive
February 2008
Previous Thread
Next Thread
Previous by Thread
Next by Thread
Previous by Date
Next by Date
Contact
The TIFF Mailing List Homepage
This list is run by Frank Warmerdam
Archive maintained by AWare Systems
Thread
2008.02.06 17:14 "Re: Tiff Digest, Vol 45, Issue 3", by Gary Mcgath
"Anders Sewerin Johansen" <asjo@kb.dk> wrote: > The reason for the question is that several parameters are relevant >for picking a format for our purposes. Some are obvious to outsiders >(size of final file, CPU requirements for rendering...), while others >may not be (openness of format, availability of several open source >renderes, patent issues). In particular the tiff/lzw format, while >suitable on most counts (stable, well-known...) is discounted due to >the patent issues past, present and future of the lzw compression >algorithm/implementation. The tiff/zip format would not be discounted >on the patent issue as far as I know, but might be discounted >with regards to cross-platform usability, if the default Linux/UNIX >system configuration did not allow for reading and writing it. One issue which concerns me, specifically with regard to long-term preservation, is that there is no vendor-independent specification for ZIP. This doesn't matter for most users, since the format is well-documented, but it has "reserved" fields, which raise questions for the reconstruction of ZIP archives decades later. I discussed that issue a little here: http://fileformats.blogspot.com/2007/08/should-there-be-iso-zip-standard.html Of course, ODF and other formats which subsume ZIP compression have the same issue, so there's a large enough body of ZIP compressed documents that my concern is probably just academic. -- Gary McGath Digital Library Software Engineer Harvard University Library Office for Information Systems http://hul.harvard.edu/~gary/index.html