1998.12.21 22:27 "Opening to page "x" in a multi-page TIFF file?", by Ted Crackel

1999.01.04 16:40 "Re: Opening to page "x" in a multi-page TIFF file?", by Mark Knibbs

You might want to convert the pages to pdf since Acrobat Reader supports opening on a specific page - even opening to a specific view (zoom level and such)

Also PDF supports most common data formats found inside tiff files (such as ccitt g4) so normally decompression is not needed to convert to pdf.

If for any reason you want to publish these on the web, Acrobat Reader is one of the few viewers available on most platforms.

IMO using PDF for scanned documents is a really bad idea, for several reasons.

The P in PDF supposedly stands for portable, but could be more accurate if it stood for proprietary. The main problem with using PDF as a file format for scanned documents is that users who do not use a platform for which Adobe provide Acrobat Reader are unable to view the document.

PDF certainly has its uses, but for scanned -- as opposed to structured -- documents, it is unnecessary overkill.

PDF is a very large, complex file format, meaning that PDF viewers are necessarily large and resource-hungry. Freely-available third-party viewers like Ghostscript and xpdf can not cope with all PDF files. Only relatively modern computers can run PDF viewers at all.

Contrast this with bitmap image file formats; if a viewer supports GIF or TIFF G4 (say), then it *will* display images using that file format.

For example, there is no Acrobat Reader for the OS I use. Ghostscript (free PostScript/PDF interpreter) does exist for it. I recently downloaded a large scanned document in PDF format from a web page. Sadly Ghostscript chokes on this file, and so I cannot view it.

TIFF G4 is a standard format, and free viewers exist for almost all platforms -- if not, free source is available in the libtiff package to convert to other file formats. TIFF G4 is widely used in document imaging applications; for example the US Patent Office use this file format. Thus TIFF G4 files are easily integrated into document management systems such as the free NIH DocView software (which BTW you should check out if you want to manage a collection of TIFF scanned documents).

Moreover, using a "pure" image file format rather than PDF allows the user to use an image-processing or printing program, and their own choice of viewing software. Apparently some printers can accept TIFF files directly, so printing may just be a matter of copying the TIFF file to a printer.

Here are some examples of free TIFF image viewers. Let me know if you want URLs for any of these. Most or all of these support multi-page TIFF files. There are probably lots more viewers which I do not know of.

For Windows 3.x/95/98/NT (Acrobat Reader may not run on low-end machines):

For Windows 95/98/NT:

For Macintosh (Acrobat Reader will not run on low-end machines):

For UNIX/NetBSD etc. (Acrobat Reader probably not available):

(both these programs use libtiff)

For Amiga (Acrobat Reader not available):

There are several free TIFF browser plugins for Netscape and IE, so viewing TIFF images from within a web browser is no more difficult than installing the Acrobat Reader plugin. I did a web search for free TIFF plugins, and there are quite a few. Maybe it would be a good idea to include links to these on web pages containing TIFF files, for people with "mainstream" computers and browsers.

  http://www.minoltausa.com/tiff_view.html
  http://www.mieweb.com/alternatiff/
  http://www.a-free-fax.com/freefax_instruct.htm
  http://cartesianinc.com/Products/CPCLite/
  http://www.visionshape.com/tiffform.html

Regards,
-- Mark Knibbs
mark_k@iname.com