[pdftex] Why was TIF support removed?

[John Lawless]

> Tiff files worked.  Why was it taken out?

     TIFF comes in many flavors: TIFF was designed to be a standard way
of packaging many not-so-standard formats.

     All the TIFF files with which I have worked were bitmap and, for
bitmaps, in my experience, better compression is usually possible with
png (not lossy) and jpeg (lossy), both of which are accepted by pdftex.
ImageMagick conversion software works well.