[texhax] TeX Collection 2003 problem

[Robin Fairbairns]

> I recently installed the new collection.  I find that pdftex appears
> not to support tiff files as graphics any more.  On my laptop, I have
> not istalled the new version, and the old version still works.  For
> the record, my old version is 3.14159 and the new version is 3.141592 

that's the underlying tex version; the most recent release of pdftex is
1.10 (with a letter suffix) -- i dont' recall which version is on
texlive.

> Is this a known bug or a new feature?

supporting tiff (which is a dog's breakfast of a format) was a mistake
in the first place.  i think the support was removed before pdftex
reached version 1.0, but i don't follow the development in detail.

if you were using tiff in one its non-lossy compression instances,
convert the images to png (which is a modern, standardised, non-
propietary format which is free of patents).  if the images are jpegs
wrapped in tiff (like our [spit] scanner provides), i guess you convert
to jpeg.  pdftex still accepts both png and jpeg format images.