2008.07.03 14:58 "Re: [Tiff] eta for bigtiff support?", by Gary McGath

Bob Friesenhahn wrote:

  Does anyone know how far along BigTiff support is? I see its on 4.0
 beta2 but I cant tell how much of the proposed spec has been
 implemented. All i really want to do is open and read tiles from a
 jpeg compressed pyramidal tiled bigtiff? Is there enough there already
 to allow me to do this?

>

> As far as I am aware, all of the spec has been implemented. The > library is currently in beta for a reason. If you are afraid to try

> it out, then you are losing the opportunity to report bugs (so they > can be fixed) prior to release. In fact the dearth of feedback is

> likely one of the reasons why the library has not yet been formally > released.

There's a reason for the lack of feedback. The documentation at http://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/bigtiff.html says:

> This is a proposal, not a specification. Don't go implementing it just

 >yet and releasing your code to the public, it has not yet been approved
 >and is liable to change. You don't want to be the one whose files turn
 >out invalid in 6 months from now.

It shouldn't be surprising that people aren't jumping in to test when the definition of BigTIFF is still in flux, and has shown no sign of approaching a stable specification.

--
Gary McGath
Digital Library Software Engineer
Harvard University Library Office for Information Systems
http://hul.harvard.edu/~gary/index.html