2006.04.19 19:26 "[Tiff] Re: Tiff Digest, Vol 23, Issue 17", by Glenn Widener

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> Message: 2
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> Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 07:40:48 -0400
> From: Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr@pdfsages.com>
> Subject: Re: [Tiff] TIFF + Group4 will last 10 years?
> To: Rui Castro <rcastro@iantt.pt>, tiff@lists.maptools.org
> Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20060419073914.04e24db0@mail1.netreach.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed

I'm working in a digital preservation project for the Portuguese National Archive. Currently we need to migrate a bunch of images created in a previous digitization project to a new physical support. The images have 2 colors (Black and White) are in TIFF format with Group4 compression. These images are going to be stored in a safe way until 2013, preferably in TIFF format (with or without compression).

Why not use PDF/A then? It's an ISO standard for long term archival storage of electronic documents. See <http://www.aiim.org/article-pr.asp?ID=30413> for details.

I'd rather ask, why use PDF/A? No reason. It's at least an order of magnitude more complex than TIFF, to no benefit, particularly for mononcrome images (unless you need to include searchable text or embed arbitrary metadata in your image file). PDF/A is new, relatively unproven, and exists to solve problems with PDF as an archive format.

TIFF will be around FOREVER, and since reading it is trivial, will always be readable on any machine to be invented in the future, as long as it can read the bits in the file.

I want to start a discussion on this list around the question:

If you were to invent an extension to TIFF called "TIFF/A", to add functionality that PDF/A has and TIFF lacks, what would you add and how?

I'm interested in embedded text, general metadata, JBIG2, maybe big files.

--
Glenn Widener
SwiftView Tools Product Manager

SwiftView Inc. - quality PCL/TIFF portable document tools and services