2012.10.16 05:36 "[Tiff] TIFF created by Kyocera 4550 Workstation is not
able to be opened in MacOS X Preview", by Andrew Roughan
Thread
2012.10.16 05:36 "[Tiff] TIFF created by Kyocera 4550 Workstation is not able to be opened in MacOS X Preview", by Andrew Roughan
Hi all,
I have discovered that TIFF output from the Kyocera 4550 Workstation is not able to be viewed in MacOS X Preview, Pixelmator or Dropbox's web preview - although it can be viewed in Windows Picture Viewer - and I'd like to learn enough about the TIFF format to be able to blame the right company :-) So far I have looked at the TIFF specification, examined the binary content of the file and used TIFFTags and TIFFInfo applications to examine the tags and now I have some questions that I am hoping that someone with more experience with the format will be able to answer.
Here's the TIFFInfo report on the tags (~40KB) (tags in decimal)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/77775927/TIFFInfo.png
Here's the TIFFTags report on the tags (~40KB) (tags in hex and some values interpreted)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/77775927/TIFFTags.png
Here's the file itself (~190KB)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/77775927/Kyocera4550Scan.tif
The first problem I have found is that the spec says that the IFD "must begin on a word boundary". In this file, it does not as the IFD offset is an odd value.
In practice, is this a significant problem these days?
I modified the file to move the IFD to a word boundary and update the offset:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/77775927/Kyocera4550ScanPatchedIFD.tif
This does not allow viewing in Dropbox's web preview. I have yet to try opening it in MacOS X Preview, however I suspect it will still fail.
There are three tags that have no count and no content: 519 (207.h) JPEGQTables, 520 (208.h) JPEGDCTables, 521 (209.h) JPEGACTables.This issue causes TIFFTags.exe to fall over, however I gather that is not a robust tool.
This does not seem to me to be a problem, because Windows Picture Viewer also
creates TIFF files with this content (e.g. after rotating the Kyocera
output).
The most likely culprit is probably the compression type 6 which apparently is an old style of JPEG compression that should not be used any more - according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF
"Obsolete 'old-style' JPEG, later overridden in Technote2" - "Obsolete, should never be written."
Can anyone confirm that this is the problem?
Personally, I think that Kyocera is not doing the right thing here and should be conforming to the later version of the specification - Technote 2.
Does anyone have any existing contact at Kyocera? Or have Kyocera equipment that is being used with Macs in the workplace? I can imagine that this would be easy to ignore without some leverage.
I opened a Apple Support Communities discussion on this topic - but I suspect that the likely outcome given the above information will be no hope of an update.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/20020491
Thanks for any insight or assistance that you can provide.
Regards,
Andrew Roughan