2008.09.30 18:03 "RE: [Tiff] Compression code 34719 (MDI Tiffs)", by ComSquare Martin Osieka

Hi Gene,

Sorry for the Greek (we say Böhmische Dörfer ;-) I know what I talked about may only be of interest for software emgineers. The issue is that our customers are using these files (I guess this format is somehow popular because you can easily add annotations. The problem was that our tool opened the files but showed only black content. As I said before I had no idea that libtiff allows the magic “EP” for TIFFs.

For sure first I’m looking for a solution for our customers but if there is a general solution for all platforms then it may be integrated in to libtiff.

In the meantime I’m able to decode these strips (not to difficult if you are looking to a hex dump of the strip).

But the result is that the decoded data is no bitmap, it is an EMF (Enhanced Meta File) data block.

So I’m able to view these special TIFFs in our product on Windows but I can not offer a general solution because for this you would need a platform independent EMF to bitmap converter.

Martin

Since this all read as Greek to me, I decided to try to find out more info on these terms through some google searching.

>From my investigation, I think you are saying that these image files are in a format used by an old version of MS office (2003), where MDI means

Microsoft >>>Document Image format and MSCD is the Microsoft Secure Content Delivery program. I think this is saying that Microsoft defined their own codec for image >>>storage in MS Office 2003. On one google result that I found, it appears that MS has abandoned this image format in later versions of MS Office.

Is this what you were saying?

Also, isn't OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) another MS-only standard that doesn't help anyone using a non-MS platform?