2004.10.01 06:35 "[Tiff] BigTIFF & PDF & tifftools", by Rob van den Tillaart

2004.10.01 13:21 "Re: [Tiff] BigTIFF & PDF & tifftools", by Frank Warmerdam

Discussion was about tifftools, and if/when they would grow 'big' too.

Would these tools become bigtiff specific or would they handle bigtiff and classic tiff transparantly? Linking them with both lib's could introduce namespace conflicts I guess. Having separate tools for classic and big would give double code bases for every tool implying a serious synchronisation effort.

As far as I know, having LibTiff handle the classic/big issue transparently, is not just possible, but is also the way Frank intends to enhance LibTiff. It will enable to stick with a single copy of the tools and tools code. Tools will not need to grow big, neither will apps, they'll support BigTIFF by default simply by using the newer LibTiff.

Folks,

First, it will be Andrey who does the BigTIFF upgrade. While I am very keen on it, I am not really prepared to put in the time to ensure it is done right.

And yes, our intent is that we would have a single library that supports both. There will certainly be some ABI changes to libtiff with the upgrade to BigTIFF support, and there will presumably be some extra options available to control whether BigTIFF or classic TIFF should be generated. So I don't think it will be completely a transparent upgrade for write purposes if you want to be able to produce BigTIFF.

But reading BigTIFF or classic TIFF files should be transparent to the application at the source level. And I hopefully TIFF reading applications that don't dig in too deep should not require any source changes either.

The ABI changes are likely to include stuff like toff_t and tsize_t becoming 64 bit types on platforms which support them.

As for Robs first question, I have no idea if PDF supports file sizes larger than 4GB or if that would be supported by tiff2pdf. I can't honestly imagine wanting to produce such a large PDF file for some years to come.

Best regards,

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