1996.11.13 14:18 "Re: Basic TIFF parsing question", by Fredrik Lundh

I chose MacPerl, btw, because it rewards little efforts and limited programming knowledge with big results. Also, I don't know C and have been holding off trying to pick it up.

That's very reasonable, IMO. If you don't want to learn C just to do such a simple thing, you could check the Python scripting language and its Python Imaging Library (PIL). Here's the Python code you need to extract the basic necessities from a TIFF file (or the other 20+ formats that PIL knows about):

        import Image

        im = Image.open("image.tiff")

        print im.mode
        print im.size

You can access arbitrary TIFF tags as well, if needed, formatted as Python data types. And yes, PIL supports lots of cool stuff for image manipulation as well.

Python itself has been available on Macs from the very beginning (it was originally developed on a Mac), but both Python and PIL runs on virtually every other platform out there. PIL 0.2 was just released, and will be available on Macs within short.

For more information about PIL, check:

        http://www.python.org/sigs/image-sig/Imaging.html

For general Python information, check:

        http://www.python.org

Or buy the O'Reilly book "Programming Python" by Mark Lutz. There's also a newsgroup called comp.lang.python.

And with the exception of that book, all this stuff is 100% free.

Regards /F

PS. As for Perl, have you tried searching for TIFF stuff in the Perl CPAN module directory? Check http://www.perl.com for details)