2005.09.16 17:49 "Re: [Tiff] What do you call...", by Antoine

Sorry, but that's just what you get if you ignore the spec on an extremely basic pillar property of the file format you wish to support.

Full respect to all the guys the contribute to libtiff in some way but... puritanism has always been a negative in OSS! There is at least one important international standard that enforces an 8th byte offset - the ATA standard(s). It is just silly (and the wankers wouldn't let me publish any of the tiff part of the standard...) and done obviously by people who have no appreciation for "the beauty of the tiff" but that is reality. I expect it has something to do with Freud but I won't go there... :-)

My personnal advice would be to go with the "only images taken with the camera are supported" line, but put an *, and an explanation of the intricacies at the bottom of the page (probably in very small writing!). It only supports 8th byte offset, T6 compression for B&W... or whatever your specificities are. After all - it doesn't *really* only support camera-generated files - and that way you cater for the geeks and Joe Blow aswell.

Cheers
Antoine