2004.04.22 18:17 "Re: [Tiff] Large Tiff and roadsigns", by Chris Cox

Yesterday when I drove home from work I was triggered bij a roadsign indicating the distance to the next cities. Every few kilometers there was a new roadsign. Suddenly I was aware that these are pointers or offsets. These pointers reference to a location with respect to the current location. Some pointed forward others backward (other side of the road :) and some pointed sideward.

What could this mean for large TIFF files?

It would mean a pain in the butt for parsing.

It would mean that the format would be much more fragile to corruption (corrupting one offset now doesn't mean the rest of the file can't be read).

However if the images themselves are larger than 2GB the pointers to the next IFD are not long enough and there is still a need for a 64 bit offset type.

Yes - a hack like this is not a good idea. Let's do it right.

Chris