2005.04.11 14:25 "Re: [Tiff] tiles or strips? who decides?", by Bob Friesenhahn

Who decides if the file is divided into tiles/ strips? The TIFF reader or the TIFF writer? If its the TIFF writer, is it then mandatory that the reader also reads it the way its written?

The decision between using tiles and strips is the writer's responsibility. The reader must use the same mode that the writer used.

Libtiff supports a strip 'chopping' mode which helps if the writer used excessively large strips by chopping large strips into many smaller strips in order to save memory while reading.

If you want to create a very simple reader which does not care how the writer prepared the file, you can use TIFFReadRGBAImage(). It is best to be aware that TIFFReadRGBAImage() is very memory innefficient and since it only returns 8-bit RGB data, support is poor, or non-existent for some other image types.

Bob
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Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/