2000.10.05 00:20 "Old-style JPEG and HP 9100C Digital Sender", by Tim Bell

2000.10.05 03:39 "Re: Old-style JPEG and HP 9100C Digital Sender", by Niles Ritter

We've got an HP 9100C Digital Sender (network connected scanner) and it seems to be producing Old-style JPEG TIFFs, which libtiff says it can't read. (We're using Linux for this.) I thought I'd check here before I sent a detailed bug report to HP tech support.

Running tiffinfo on one of the files gives:

Compression Scheme: Old-style JPEG

Tim,

At any cost, you have got to convince the Vendor to stop producing old JPEG-TIFF, and to burn all copies of their source code and sew the ground with salt. It cannot be implemented, should not be implemented, and is EVIL.

The original TIFF Tech note #2 on the proper implementation of JPEG in TIFF (as opposed to Evil Bogus JPEG-in-TIFF of the 6.0 variety) can still be found at:

ftp://ftp.sgi.com/graphics/tiff/TTN2.draft.txt

which is also the location quoted on the "libtiff.org" webpage. There is simply no excuse for not knowing about this note, it has been around since the mid 90's.

The www.libtiff.org also has examples of what a valid (for public consumption) JPEG-in-TIFF file should look like. It has successfully been implemented using the libtiff package combined with the libjpeg package, thanks to the efforts of many people including Tom Lane and others.

There is simply no excuse for promulgating evil files around. It may be compliant with the TIFF-6.0 spec, but that portion of the spec is itself bad. Very bad.

--Niles (author, The Unofficial TIFF Web page)
              http://home.earthlink.net/~ritter/tiff