2004.04.22 21:35 "Re: [Tiff] Large TIFF files", by Joris Van Damme

The values would not be ASCII, just the tags. There can't be any problem with interpreting the tags -- it's just using human readable strings (7 bit ASCII, roman character set, English) instead of numbers.

Nevertheless, computer, and not human, being the 'primary reader', I can't help wondering what is wrong with the plain old WORD value? What is wrong with the old tags? I can only see what is right: almost 15 years of experience and evolution, a webfull of documentation, and an existing library with very few misunderstandings.

Why is everybody so keen in discussing changes that are at best not needed and rather auxilliary to the issue? This discussion started of with the goal extending the size limits of TIFF. A plain obvious clean tranformation from 32bit count/offset values to 64bit would do that, so we may want to discuss that instead. Another real issue is signature value, new header. A big issue may be the size limits to individual strips/tiles, like can we keep old compression scemes unchanged or not? I'm not seeing this being discussed at all.

>From a LibTiff point of view: I recently noticed someone asking whether the individual codecs in LibTiff can be used all by themselves, with another encapsulator. Is there any defenite answer/progress in this field? It would seem like this may be a first basis for extending LibTiff in whatever new 64bit direction. I am also personally interested in this, for use in a 32bit as well as 64bit offset based ObjectPascal encapsulator.

Joris Van Damme
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