2007.07.03 18:37 "[Tiff] BigTIFF extension?", by Phil Harvey

2007.07.05 21:04 "Re: [Tiff] Re: Tiff Digest, Vol 38, Issue 12", by Chris Cox

On 7/5/07 7:39 AM, "Joris" <joris.at.lebbeke@skynet.be> wrote:

Stick with reality. What do programmers/users know about TIFF, what does it stand for? Any part of that actually changed?

Compatibility with all existing software.

We've seen that argument before. I've replied before (amongst other replies) that the same goes for tiling in TIFF, it was not compatible with all existing software either. So far, nobody contradicted my reply, so let's stop returning to square one in this part of the discussion.

With a tiled TIFF or different compression schemes, the file is recognized as TIFF and gets a more useful error message ("unsupported compression scheme", "unrecognized storage method", etc.).

BigTIFF does have the disadvantage over all previous changes in that it will get "Not a TIFF file" or "corrupt file" error messages from all previous software.

That is a real concern for many users, and what lead Adobe to use .psb instead of .psd for the 64 bit offset version of the PSD file format (despite being the same format internally).

Chris