2002.12.04 00:50 "tiffdump prints some tags incorrectly", by Glenn Herteg

tiffdump (in tiff-v3.5.7) sometimes fails to report out tag values correctly. A specific instance is an array of two SHORT values, such as the PageNumber tag (Section 12 of the TIFFv6 specification). The problem is that both the PrintByte() and PrintShort() routines in tiffdump.c use oversimplified logic:

    if (hdr.tiff_magic != TIFF_LITTLEENDIAN) {

to try to figure out the ordering of values, rather than the swabflag (if testing a flag is even needed here) which is defined elsewhere for a related purpose. A specific situation in which this bug is manifested is reading a big-endian TIFF file on a big-endian machine (SPARC Solaris, in my case). In this case, the two values of PageNumber are printed in the wrong order.

Glenn Herteg