1994.02.11 03:23 "Re: LIBTIFFW followup.", by Richard Minner

The way I have implemented byte ordering is: The first letter of the mode string supplied to TIFFOpen is 'r' for read, 'w' for write or 'a' for append. If opening for writing, the second letter is 'l' to force little endian or 'b' to force big-endian. This was done because the tiff header is written during open which is the first operation applied to a tiff file.

Hmmm. I agree with your decision to put the endian-specifier in the mode string, but your choice of 'b' is unfortunate. It is probably too late and probably doesn't really matter (since TIFF files are always binary) but 'b' is the ANSI/ISO modifier in fopen() mode strings for "binary stream" (as opposed to "text stream"). That is, it might be a bit confusing to see TIFFOpen(path, "rb"). I think 'M' and 'I' as in the TIFF spec would be better, but as I said, it is probably too later and doesn't matter much.

--
Richard Minner rtm@island.com {uunet,sun,well}!island!rtm
Island Graphics Corporation Sacramento, CA (916) 736-1323