LibTiff Mailing List
TIFF and LibTiff Mailing List Archive
March 2000
Previous Thread
Next Thread
Previous by Thread
Next by Thread
Previous by Date
Next by Date
Contact
The TIFF Mailing List Homepage
This list is run by Frank Warmerdam
Archive maintained by AWare Systems
Thread
2000.03.28 10:36 "Re: TIFF 7.0", by Csaba Szigetvári
Hi, > Niles Ritter <ritter@earthlink.net> writes: > > TIFF, as an Aldus-Microsoft development, has always been the > > green-haired stepchild at Adobe, ever since they acquired Aldus (*). > > They've never known what to do with it, and I think secretly hope if > > they ignore it enough it will just go away. > > I have heard a pretty credible rumor that TPTB within Adobe are sitting > on the ready-to-go TIFF 7.0 spec for exactly that reason --- they want > TIFF dead. They think it's competition for PDF, or something like > that... When I started to investigate the possibilities of TIF a few years ago it became quite obvious where Adobe got the base concept for PDF from. >From Abobe's business point-of-view it makes of course more sense to have a proprietary format instead of extending the TIF format. I might be wrong but all in all I do not think that PDF can do anything that wouldn't be possible in a TIF format file with the appropriate tags. However, I sometimes wonder why the maintainers and supporters of tifflib do not come up with their own standard: by gathering a certain range of private tags it would be possible to remain compatible with Abobe, should they ever release the TIFF spec 7.0. On the other hand, by having released a quasi-standard Adobe could be forced (maybe) to release the spec in order to maintain at least a certain amount of control This would make sense also because the "living" TIF community is nowadays completely independant from Adobe in all aspects, as far as I can tell. I know that this topic has been brought up here before, but I do not know what conclusions have been made (if any)? Maybe someone already has a draft or wishlist for improvements? Should there be any action in that direction I would gladly provide my 5 free tags... Regards, Csaba Szigetvári graphic&design development