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Mr TIFF

inventingthefuture.ghost.io

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Re: Mr TIFF

#103

Post by quitit »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #102
quitit wrote: post #97

Quietly thankful that the spec author didn't proclaim that we've been mispronouncing "TIFF" all these years.

The "TI" is really "Tl" and is a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate.

I tried to pronounce it, but summoned a daemon instead

Re: Mr TIFF

#104

Post by kens »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #40
hellojohnbuck wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks adam

Hey John, I'm just curious how people find these comments about "would be nice if X saw this" on HN. I don't think there's any pinging behavior. Did somebody message you? Did you just happen to read it? Do you have an eldritch curse that summons you when called by name?

I use f5bot.com, which monitors HN, Reddit, and Lobsters. (I have no connection to f5bot except being a happy user.)

Re: Mr TIFF

#105

Post by antonis-gr »

nullhole wrote: post #9

Don't have much to add except to mention again that the magic number for TIF is 42, and it's 42 because of the meaning of 42: https://web.archive.org/web/20210108174645/https://www.adobe... Bytes 2-3 An arbitrary but carefully chosen number (42) that further identifies the file as a TIFF file

42 is an extremely non-special number. Does anyone know if it appeared in the CS field before Douglas Addams "invented" it?

Re: Mr TIFF

#106

Post by EvanAnderson »

flancian wrote: post #87

I had downloaded the final Aldus TIFF specifications document, hoping to find the author’s name. However, the name is seemingly written in white text on white paper - making it invisible. What? Is there an explanation for this that I missed? Was it an Easter Egg left by the author?

I've found a number of hidden items in PDFs masked in the same way. The one that comes to mind immediately are Dell product code names hiding in official spec PDFs. (The PowerConnect 6200-series switches are "Kinnick", for example.) I always assumed it was a lazy redaction method and people weren't necessarily aware the text wasn't actually redacted.

Re: Mr TIFF

#107

Post by blacklion »

4ndrewl wrote: post #57

The great thing about TIF was it's extensibility. Flexible (data could be stored as tiles or in stripes), multiple compression options etc. Well documented spec, easy to bolt on extras either as public tags - GeoTIFFs added projection metadata - or private, for your own needs. Back in the day, to improve a desktop application's performance I found it was simple to create a custom reader and writer to handle cases whe…

Unfortunately, it doesn't help.

Almost any digital camera RAW format is TIFF inside. And you can see how much kludges good metadata library needs to read all of them: offsets from the IFD, offsets from beginning of file with or without header, offsets from fields in IFD, etc, etc, etc. You take TIFF, you change header to make your format, and then you cannot implement this TIFF properly!

Even DNG (which is tiff inside) is mangled by camera firmware authors!

Re: Mr TIFF

#109

Post by daniel_reetz »

hellojohnbuck wrote: post #56
OisinMoran wrote: post #8

If you had told me an article ostensibly about a file format would have me teary-eyed by the end I wouldn't have believed you. This is beautiful, thank you!

Thanks oisin, it's a beautiful story and his ex-wife gave me permission to share.

A huge number of us labor behind the scenes with no public acknowledgment or credit. For each idea brought to life we might hope for -at most- an epitaph carved in expired patent claims.

This story is touching.

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