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July 2007
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2007.07.05 15:26 "Re: Tiff Digest, Vol 38, Issue 12", by Andrey Kiselev
On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 10:14:47AM -0400, Gary McGath wrote: > >Stick with reality. What do programmers/users know about TIFF, what > >does it stand for? Any part of that actually changed? > > Compatibility with all existing software. Please, do not make general assumptions. BigTIFF is compatible with existing software. We have open source solution (CVS HEAD of libtiff library that anyone can get and use) and Joris has his proprietary solution. So there is even more than 1 choice. I have rebuilt ImageMagick using the new libtiff and it works just fine (after adding BigTIFF signature to the file format detection routine). Certainly there should be more work to support files >4 GB, but smaller BigTIFF files work with IM on my system. It means that almost every tool on my box will support BigTIFF as soon as it will be recompiled with the new library. If you have no possibility to rebuild your software with updated libtiff it is a problem, but it is not a problem for _every_ user and it is not a problem of _all_ software. Outdated software will be incompatible with BigTIFF, but there is widely used software that is not compatible with JPEG and ZIP compression schemes and band separated images, why should we bother that something is not compatible with BigTIFF? Best regards, Andrey -- Andrey V. Kiselev ICQ# 26871517