[pdftex] Why was TIF support removed?

[Hans Hagen]

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


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                   Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE | pragma at wxs.nl
                       Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
  tel: +31 (0)38 477 53 69 | fax: +31 (0)38 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
                        information: http://www.pragma-ade.com/roadmap.pdf
                     documentation: http://www.pragma-ade.com/showcase.pdf
-------------------------------------------------------------------------