1999.10.23 03:52 "Re: LIBTIFF and OJPEG", by Tom Lane

I'm trying to build libtiff so that it will support compression 6 (OJPEG), however I can't get it to worK

There is no OJPEG support in libtiff, only some hooks that are unlikely ever to be filled in.

I need OJPEG_SUPPORT in order to convert TIFF images that were made with this compression mode to PDF.

Made under whose interpretation of the ambiguous TIFF 6.0 spec? See TIFF Tech Note #2 at ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/TIFFTechNote2.txt.gz (among other places) for the gory details of the spec's problems. And the TN politely glosses over the fact that most known implementations of OJPEG are demonstrably broken: they are incompatible with *any* plausible reading of the spec.

In short, there's no such thing as old-JPEG TIFF, there is only a Tower of Babel of mutually incompatible proprietary flavors of TIFF. You'll almost certainly have to use the same program that made those files in order to read them. Possibly you could reverse-engineer the files to develop a special-purpose reader, but is it worth your time?

regards, tom lane
organizer, Independent JPEG Group