[pdftex] Why was TIF support removed?

[Jeffrey McArthur]

On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 19:22:02 +0200, you wrote:

That reminds me of the argument about CALS tables in SGML.  Nothing
completely supported CALS tables. I created a simple little example where
the rows and columns came in from right to left, bottom to top.  Nothing
could read it. Though that was suppored by the standard.  The same is true
with TIFF.  The standard is very complicated.

I guess I have another question.  Why was the size of the binaries
important? Does it really matter with todays disk size? 



>At 07:36 12/07/2003 -0400, Jeffrey McArthur wrote:
>> >pdftex does not support TIFF any more. ...
>>
>>Tiff files worked.  Why was it taken out?
>>Including Tiffs has proven a lot more reliable than including PDFs.
>>Particularly including PDFs generated by propritary software.
>
>there are many kinds of tiffs and keeping up with all its flavors is a 
>pain; the problem is that a tiff file needs to be converted to something 
>that pdf can handle (compression, sampling, etc); in the pdf reference 
>manual you can find more details on that. What gets accepted by pdftex 
>depends on to what extend the standards are obeyed. Both pdf and tiff are 
>propritary standards (both adobe). Since tiff is just a container format 
>the problem is in all those non standard taggs that can be in there.
>
>tiff was taken out when it ended up in a continuous update (apart from 
>doubling the size of the pdftex binaries);
>
>With regards to embedding pdf: it may help to stick to (or flatten files 
>to) pdf/x
>
>[i'm not even sure if imagemagick handles all tiffs]
>
>Hans
>
>
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    Jeffrey M\kern-.05em\raise.5ex\hbox{\b c}\kern-.05emArthur
    a.k.a. Jeffrey McArthur          ATLIS Publishing Services