1999.12.01 18:04 "Re: ZIP compression [was: libtiff 3.5.3 release.]", by Bryan H. Maret

As you may or may not know, Adobe's Image Ready support ZIP compressed TIFFs (reading and writing), but they use a different tag for the compression scheme.

If that's the case, then it's also true for other Adobe products (Photoshop, ImageStyler, InDesign, etc.) since they all use the same technology (and shared libraries) for doing image processing.

Sadly, this is not the case. While Adobe makes great use of shared libraries and plugins for most things, ImageReady and Photoshop use quite different libraries for TIFF. At least that was the case when I left Adobe a year ago. Perhaps all Adobe products are using a shared TIFF plugin by now, but when I left Adobe, only ImageReady supported Deflate compression (aka ZIP compression). This was all covered in the Spring '99 issue of Adobe Magazine (page 82). It is interesting that Adobe would mention TIFF 7 in their magazine, while not releasing the spec!

So it lloks like Adobe is already heading torwards adding ZIP compression to the TIFF specification, but is using a different tag scheme.

I don't know any of the specifics of what they are doing, but I do know that Adobe has been working on a TIFF 7, that incorporates a number of improvements.

As long-term members of the list will probably remember, I posted quite a bit to the list about TIFF 7 when I finished the first draft of the TIFF 7 spec - that's over 3 years ago, now. I don't know how much has happened since then.

regards-
-Bryan Maret
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