[texhax] TeX Collection 2003 problem

[Thomas R Keane]

Robin,

Thank you very much for the information.  I am not knowledgeable about
graphics formats.  I have now done some reading on the subject, and I'll be
using png for all the figures I prepare.

I am a chemcial engineer, recently retuired from DuPont.  I am preparing a
few monographs using pdfTeX, and I had been using tiff format, and suddenly
without warning, I was in trouble.

The documentation for pdftex needs a little work in view of all this, but
I'm sure that's not your problem.

Many thanks for your help.

Tom Keane

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Fairbairns" <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk>
To: "Thomas R Keane" <tomkeane at comcast.net>
Cc: <support at tug.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2004 8:36 AM
Subject: Re: [texhax] TeX Collection 2003 problem


> > 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.
>