2000.03.28 10:36 "Re: TIFF 7.0", by cszigetv

Hi,

TIFF, as an Aldus-Microsoft development, has always been the green-haired stepchild at Adobe, ever since they acquired Aldus (*). They've never known what to do with it, and I think secretly hope if they ignore it enough it will just go away.

I have heard a pretty credible rumor that TPTB within Adobe are sitting on the ready-to-go TIFF 7.0 spec for exactly that reason --- they want TIFF dead. They think it's competition for PDF, or something like that...

When I started to investigate the possibilities of TIF a few years ago it became quite obvious where Adobe got the base concept for PDF from. >From Abobe's business point-of-view it makes of course more sense to have a proprietary format instead of extending the TIF format. I might be wrong but all in all I do not think that PDF can do anything that wouldn't be possible in a TIF format file with the appropriate tags.

However, I sometimes wonder why the maintainers and supporters of tifflib do not come up with their own standard: by gathering a certain range of private tags it would be possible to remain compatible with Abobe, should they ever release the TIFF spec 7.0. On the other hand, by having released a quasi-standard Adobe could be forced (maybe) to release the spec in order to maintain at least a certain amount of control

This would make sense also because the "living" TIF community is nowadays completely independant from Adobe in all aspects, as far as I can tell.

I know that this topic has been brought up here before, but I do not know what conclusions have been made (if any)? Maybe someone already has a draft or wishlist for improvements?

Should there be any action in that direction I would gladly provide my 5 free tags...

Regards,

Csaba Szigetv�ri
graphic&design development