2000.12.05 09:32 "New Java/JAI TIFF Codec Beta Online", by Niles Ritter

Good news, tiff-people,

In order to implement a decent "geotiff' extension to the Java Advanced Imaging component I found myself completely rewriting the "tiff" codec Sun provides in JAI. I have now made this package public for beta evaluation, and am hopeful that with an open-source mechanism in place it will begin to have all the power & flexibility of Sam Leffler's C-based "libtiff" libraries. The main package is called "xtiff.jar" and the GeoTIFF extensions to xtiff are called "geotiff.jar".

Downloads, documentation and example test-source are available at

htpp://www.geotiff.org/

Amongst the capabilities provided by xtiff.jar are

1. Ability to add user-defined Tags to the output encoded image
2. Access to the TIFFDirectory by way of a "tiff.directory" property
3. Ability to write tiled images
4. Enabling of writing compressed data
5. Simple, extensible "TIFF Tile Codec" registry API for adding new TIFF compression schemes.
6. Extensibility of directory structure and color space handling

The geotiff.jar takes advantage of the extensiblity of xtiff to produce a GeoTIFF directory, along with a KeyRegistry that can translate between string names "PCSCoordinateType" and its numeric codes. (The registry work is not yet complete, but does have support for all of the 1.0 GeoTIFF key names, as well as the EPSG PCS codes).

I plan to make the source available through SourceForge in the near future, on an open source basis. Meanwhile if you would like to test it out go to the links at my GeoTIFF.org web page.

I have also provided links to a jarfile containing fully functional source for testing the TIFF and GeoTIFF read/write capabilities. This will give you a better clue for how to use the classes in the context of JAI image processing.

Requirements: Java 1.2, JAI 1.1.

Comments welcome.

Enjoy!

--Niles.