Message-ID: 38E08B19.AE35D81F@citicorp.com
Subject: Re: TIFF 7.0
From: cszigetv <csaba.szigetvari@citicorp.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 11:36:17 +0100
CC: tiff@olympiakos.com
Organization: citicorp
References: <3.0.6.32.20000326150127.007ed1f0@127.0.0.1> <38DE607A.168950E9@earthlink.net> <4393.954172082@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Reply-To: csaba.szigetvari@citicorp.com
Sender: owner-tiff@olympiakos.com



Hi,


> Niles Ritter <ritter@earthlink.net> writes:
> > 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 Szigetvári
graphic&design development

