2005.07.21 18:45 "Re: [Tiff] Looking for the definitions of (MS Specific?) tags", by Joris Van Damme

Ulf,

you remember our conversation around the 19 May.

Please publish the "known unknown" tags on your web-site. This perhaps will enforce Microsoft to give an official comment to the actual meaning and will enthuse other developers, to include support for this tags in their programs.

I'm currently having hosting issues. The space available to me is very nearly full, and it's rather expensive to go and by yet another block. For these reasons, I'm hoping to move to another host that I have in mind, quite probably sometime in the course of next month. Up to that time, the available space left is exclusively for the maling list archive, hoping it will suffice...

When I resolved this issue, I will publish the 'known unknown' tags first thing.

I would like to add that private tag owners are in no way obligated to publish details. Sometimes there are very good reasons for private tag owners to not disclose any information about them. Also, lots of private tags aren't useful to anyone but their owner, anyway. We ought to make that clear, as this private tag scheme and the option to not reveal its use is actually a good thing about TIFF that adds usefulness to the format, in some situations.

This being said, I agree there still are plenty of undocumented private tags that could be useful to lots of people, for no good reason at all. Some of the Microsoft tags could quite likely belong to this category. But I wouldn't expect anything to change though. Their software is still producing their private interpretation of old-style jpeg-in-tiff, go figure. It seems they did't notice Adobe publishing a specification supplement and hosting it for nearly four years or so, so how could we expect they would notice us?

Joris Van Damme
info@awaresystems.be
http://www.awaresystems.be/
Download your free TIFF tag viewer for windows here:
http://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/astifftagviewer.html