2000.11.21 00:59 "How to use the TIFFVGetField() interface", by Tobias Patton

Hello all;

DISCLAIMER: This is my first posting to the TIFF mailing list. If that's doesn't scare you enough, let me say this: I am very new to C/C++ programming. The little programming I've done has been in Perl. I do, however, understand TIFFs quite well. I've written an object oriented TIFF Library in Perl that works fairly well, even if it's stupendously ugly. You've been warned. Read on at your own peril.

I need to write a C++ program that copies verbatim a number of tags from one TIFF header to a newly created TIFF. It seems to me that I should be able to do this quite simply with the TIFFVGetField() and TIFFVSetField() subroutines. My understanding is that regardless of the number and type of values represented in a given tag, these can all be referenced by an va_list pointer. I should be able to step through all the tags I need copied, TIFFVGetField() the values into a va_list pointer, and then TIFFVSetField() into the new TIFF with the same pointer.

Unfortunately, when I try this, I get "Illegal Access" errors. I think this mostly comes down to my complete lack of understanding of how to use variable argument lists. I suppose I need to initialize the va_list pointer, but none of the obvious things seem to work.

I'm developing in Visual Studio 6.0sp4 on W2K.

Here's the code that gives the error:

int newCopyIfd (TIFF* in, TIFF* out) {
    const int TagsToCopy[] = {
                                TIFFTAG_DOCUMENTNAME,
                                TIFFTAG_IMAGEDESCRIPTION,

                                ... SNIP ...

                                TIFFTAG_XRESOLUTION,
                                TIFFTAG_YRESOLUTION
                            };
    const int NumTagsToCopy = 39;
    va_list ap;
    for (int i = 0; i < NumTagsToCopy; i++) {
        if (TIFFVGetField (in, TagsToCopy[i], ap)) {
            TIFFVSetField (out, TagsToCopy[i], ap);
        }
    }
    return 1;
}

Thanks.

Tobias Patton