2004.04.15 00:26 "[Tiff] Large TIFF files", by Lynn Quam

2004.04.22 21:49 "Re: [Tiff] Large TIFF files", by Bob Friesenhahn

The values would not be ASCII, just the tags. There can't be any problem with interpreting the tags -- it's just using human readable strings (7 bit ASCII, roman character set, English) instead of numbers.

Nevertheless, computer, and not human, being the 'primary reader', I can't help wondering what is wrong with the plain old WORD value? What is wrong with the old tags? I can only see what is right: almost 15 years of experience and evolution, a webfull of documentation, and an existing library with very few misunderstandings.

Why is everybody so keen in discussing changes that are at best not needed and rather auxilliary to the issue? This discussion started of with the goal extending the size limits of TIFF. A plain obvious clean tranformation from

I agree with you on this. While there there may be a desire to "fix" and "improve" 64-bit TIFF over 32-bit TIFF, if the changes are not restricted to the minimum required to support large file sizes, then the updates to existing TIFF readers and writers will not be trivial, and it becomes likely that 64-bit TIFF will fail. If reading/writing 64-bit TIFF with existing source code is as trivial as updating some typedefs, and ensuring that calculations don't overflow, then there is a much higher probability that the new format will be generally accepted.

Bob

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Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen