Subject: Re: TIFF spec

From: dwells at nrao.edu (Don Wells)
Date: 01 Dec 1994 23:27:41 GMT

In article <3bi5bi$8nd at barnacle.iol.ie> ai at iol.ie (Astronomy Ireland)
    writes: "Does anyone have the technical specifications for TIFF
    image format? Or know where I might get them?" 

The traffic archive at ftp://fits.cv.nrao.edu/fits/traffic/ contains a
wide variety of information about data formats which I judge might be
of potential interest to astronomy-related people. The subdirectories
are named for the newsgroups and mailing lists which I monitor and
archive: iaufwg, scidataformats, altgraphicspixutils, metadata,
sciimageprocessing, compcompression, sciastro, wfc, sciastrofits,
wgas, heafits, sciastroresearch. This archive is indexed, and the WAIS
server wais://fits.cv.nrao.edu/nrao-fits will search the index for
you. A WAIS search on the string 'tiff' currently finds 129(!) items.
Here are some sample titles:

 gary at maple Re: Re: TIFF library at Uni. of California, Berkeley 
 tgl+ at cs.cm Re: JPEG image compression: Frequently Asked Questions 
 lip at s1.gov Re: FITS, GIF, TIFF, etc... 
 ipe at utu.fi Re: Re: TIFF File format 
 eric at fuji1 Re: Re: TIFF image file question 

A quick look at these messages found this one, a response to some
variation on your question:
--------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: sci.data.formats
From: grisebac at isoit109.BBN.HP.COM (#Eberhard Grisebach)
Subject: Re: TIFF File format
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 06:01:12 GMT
The description of TIFF Revision 6.0 is about 120 pages!!!
What exactly do you want?
----------------------------------------------------
Searching further down in the list of 129 items found this message:
-------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: alt.graphics.pixutils
From: feck at informatik.uni-kl.de (Christoph Feck IRZ)
Subject: Re: TIFF specification...
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 1994 12:37:25 GMT

ffeschet at ens-lyon.fr (Fabien Feschet) wrote:
> Tag Image File Format  Rev 4.0
> April 31, 1987

Ouch! This is old.  Rev 6.0 is the current.  You can find it
at ftp.sgi.com:/graphics/tiff/TIFF6.ps.Z (P*stScript file).
-----------------------------------------------------------

The last line above is probably the answer to your question.

                -*-

O'Reilly & Associates have announced a new book:

Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats
James D. Murray & William vanRyper
1st Edition July 1994
928 pages, plus CD-ROM
ISBM 1-56592-058-9, $59.95

They say "..we managed to describe nearly 100 formats and to include
specs, images, and/or code examples for most of them on the CD-ROM.."
Of course, both FITS and TIFF are in the list.
I intend to order a copy for myself RSN.
--
  Donald C. Wells         Associate Scientist         dwells at nrao.edu
                    http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/~dwells
  National Radio Astronomy Observatory                +1-804-296-0277
  520 Edgemont Road,   Charlottesville, Virginia       22903-2475 USA