On Sat, 18 Sep 1999, Carl B. Constantine wrote: > Needless to say, GraphicConverter (and the other graphics programs I tried) > couldn't open the file, or it would just display as virtually all black and > some noise. I sent a note and a copy of one image off to the author and > received the following information back from him: > > > I found the problem with the TIFF file. > > This is the first LZW compressed TIFF with FillOrder=2 (the Adobe TIFF specs > > do normally not allow this!). > > Is this a bug? should the LZW compression be changed so that it conforms to > standard? Probably. Looking at this for the first time it seems someone doesn't understand how libtiff handles platform interoperability. They've seen a flag for LSB2MSB vs MSB2LSB and they've assumed it's going to affect the II vs MM heading on the files (TIFF requires that you understand both, but lots of boneheaded people didn't listen) AFAICT In fact we've been controlling a special-purpose flag which swaps around the meaning of the data internally -- after compensation for endian problems has been completed. In fact, libTIFF explicitly does not provide a flag for toggling II vs MM, because THAT IS EVIL. For those people who're about to shout "We must support Mac users", note that this _complaint_ came from a Mac user. We're not helping them by labelling this option "Mac vs PC", when it's really "Normal vs Weird" The author of these programs is right, his baseline decoder is not required to handle this case (libTIFF does) and we should stop making them. Unless someone replies *urgently* to this list with an example of an application which provably can only load LSB2MSB TIFF files, I will commit a fix for this in the next 48 hours. The fix will (1) Remove all mention of LSB vs MSB handling from Gimp's TIFF loader, including the GUI. (2) Change the PDB interface, unless someone screams because they need the existing interface. NB NB NB NB NB NB If you insist on using TIFF you will get burnt. It is an ugly format which is well past its sell-by date. The world will be a better place if you never create another TIFF file in your life. For LZW TIFF this goes at least double. Nick -- Tired of fixing TIFF bugs
