[HN Gopher] Mr TIFF
___________________________________________________________________
Mr TIFF
Author : speckx
Score : 973 points
Date : 2025-11-04 22:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (inventingthefuture.ghost.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (inventingthefuture.ghost.io)
| righthand wrote:
| Crazy this information would have probably been lost in time if
| one single person on this planet didn't give a shit like the rest
| of us.
|
| What a journey and congratulations to SC (don't want to spoil it)
| on your 15 minutes and rightful restoration as inventor of TIFF,
| take your place in history.
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| thanks righthand, i guess it was just curiosity that led me
| down the path. most people do give a sh## but i hear you. i
| also had the time to search, as i wasn't super busy with work.
| righthand wrote:
| Thank you so much again for your efforts, I sound brash but
| this really is inspiring and as you demonstrated and have
| indicated, we can all use our free time to easily make the
| world a little more accurate and better.
| Nition wrote:
| I'd like to add, it's really nice when good people get
| recognized purely for their work, rather than because they're
| loud enough to be noticed. I very much appreciate people like
| yourself that take the time to look for the quiet ones like
| this.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| Pretty amazing investigation work. Very nice to see that credit
| is being given where due.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I participated in creating a history book, in regard to an
| organization in which I'm involved.
|
| It took eight years, and was a _lot_ of work. The process that
| he mentioned is quite familiar. Many of the folks we
| interviewed have since passed away. Some, before the book was
| complete.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| Threads like this are, in a sense, like a digital wake - we
| can all mourn Carlsen a little bit now. I remember the first
| time I saw a .TIF - on Rainbow Paint, a free paint program
| bundled with a Dexxa mouse my old man bought as an upgrade
| for our 286. To me, running across a random .tif somewhere
| was such a delight, something I could open as a surprise,
| maybe re-use parts of, zoom into, etc. or share on a disk
| with a friend. It's quaint, now...
| lookingdesk wrote:
| I checked the TIFF talk page and found comments from:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Scarlsen
|
| Turns out the answer was on Wikipedia already :).
| adzm wrote:
| If anyone can contact John Buck this sounds like information
| he'd be interested in. Also an interesting avenue for future
| investigative work.
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| thanks adam
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| 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?
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Not who you're asking for, but generally I think it's
| just a case of the author also being an HN regular.
| Although, I suppose you could set up some Google Alerts
| for mentions of your blog posts.
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| Somebody subscribed to my blog with ref to hacker news so
| i just poked my head in :-)
| shawn_w wrote:
| Once upon a time there was a guy who went by Kibo who
| would search Usenet feeds for posts mentioning his
| username and reply to them...
| wiredfool wrote:
| Kibo greps
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I bet Musk hacked something together (or has a column in
| TweetDeck if that's still around) that continuously
| searches for mentions. I wonder if there's a tool like
| that that covers more of the internet, although the
| primary users would only be famous people and/or their
| agents / social media staff.
| wongarsu wrote:
| There are lots of tools that do this if you are willing
| to pay for it. "Social Media Monitoring" or "Brand
| Monitoring" would be the keywords to search for
| davedx wrote:
| From what I've seen, sometimes people see that their blog
| post got a lot of referral traffic from Hacker News and
| they come have a look to see where it came from.
| kens wrote:
| I use f5bot.com, which monitors HN, Reddit, and Lobsters.
| (I have no connection to f5bot except being a happy
| user.)
| phibz wrote:
| I've seen Ken Shirriff do this. You mention him and
| suddenly he's there.
| kens wrote:
| hi! :-) As I commented elsewhere, f5bot.com is a nice,
| free tool to monitor HN
| oidar wrote:
| His lone comment:
|
| >Yes it is true: the second word of a TIFF file, 42, was indeed
| taken from the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the
| Universe, and Everything, from Hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galaxy.
| StephenECarlsen 23:38, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
| svat wrote:
| Thanks! If you look at his (logged-in) edits on Wikipedia
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Scarlsen
| ), then apart from the lone comment on the talk page (about the
| reason for "42") and creating that user page, he has two edits
| to the TIFF article:
|
| - one of them clarifies the (non-)involvement of Microsoft:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TIFF&diff=prev&ol...
|
| - and the other is even more interesting: though he is being
| scrupulous and _removing_ a sentence that has no published
| citations, in his edit summary he confirms that it is basically
| true:
|
| > _The author of the original TIFF specification wanted TIFF to
| stand for "The Image File Format", but he was overruled by
| Aldus' president Paul Brainerd on the grounds that it sounded
| presumptuous._
|
| (The edit summary says: _Removed the "The Image File Format"
| sentence, since it only has eye-witness support (me, for one),
| but no published citatations_)
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Ok so then we could technically edit it back in since he's a
| primary source, right?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Technically yes, but I'm fairly sure Wikipedia wants cited
| sources, not "I'm the guy, I said so" anecdotal sources.
|
| Of course, if he was still alive he could have written a
| blog post or something like that and use that as a source,
| much like how it's likely this blog post will be used as a
| source for things surrounding the format and person.
| wongarsu wrote:
| That would be what Wikipedia calls "original research". A
| big no-no on wikipedia. At a minimum he would have to tweet
| or blog about it and link the tweet or blog. And even then
| that's a primary source, which wikipedia considers less
| valuable. Ideally he would get someone else to report on
| his tweet/blog and use that as source. Then the wikipedia
| gods are happy
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_researc
| h
| beAbU wrote:
| So can we use this conversation on HN as a secondary
| source, and edit the deletion back in citing Hacker News?
| svat wrote:
| It's been a few years since I edited Wikipedia seriously,
| but the criterion for inclusion on Wikipedia is/was
| "verifiability, not truth" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W
| ikipedia:Verifiability,_not_t...) - what matters is not
| whether something is true, but whether it has been
| published in a reliable source
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources).
| Accordingly, Wikipedia tries to be based on secondary
| sources (rather than primary and tertiary ones). The
| relevant section (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:N
| o_original_research...) says, among other things:
|
| > Primary sources that have been reputably published may be
| used in Wikipedia, but only with care
|
| and I imagine a Wikipedia edit summary does not count as a
| reliable source. (For one thing, despite it being very
| plausible that the Wikipedia user Scarlsen who signed
| himself as Stephen E Carlsen is indeed that person--I
| believe it completely!--it cannot be guaranteed that it
| wasn't an impostor, for example.)
| pstuart wrote:
| This is valuable work in cataloging the foundations of the
| computing industry!
|
| It's weird to see times one has lived through presented as
| ancient history....
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Computer science is such a young field that we can still sit at
| the feet of the giants whose shoulders we stand on.
| hyperhello wrote:
| And that's a wonderful lesson to try searching alternate
| spellings of names for an oral history.
| dado3212 wrote:
| Did a similar deep dive for one of the posters for the cult
| classic movie Possession (1981). Just giving random phone numbers
| a call is incredibly effective, lots of people are happy to
| reminisce about old work and have great stories.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Very often these people are so humble and so amazed to find
| that anyone cares so much about some little project they did.
| I've brought some people to comic cons and they have been blown
| away by the fans they never knew they had. (and they always
| have fascinating industry stories to tell)
| OisinMoran wrote:
| 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!
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| Thanks oisin, it's a beautiful story and his ex-wife gave me
| permission to share.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| It is, indeed. Thanks for writing that up, it touched me.
|
| And thanks for being the historian of our culture-that-
| eschews culture (or so it seems to me sometimes, that tech
| tries to exist in a perennial present without acknowledging
| it's roots and history)
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| thanks isoprophlex for the acknowledgment. so many of the
| folks that i have interviewed, contributed so much to
| making tech or a product better for all. especially at or
| around apple. they receieved none of the credit that the
| 'names' got. ;-) you know who i mean.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| 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.
| btreecat wrote:
| Thank you both!
| nullhole wrote:
| 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
| adzm wrote:
| And here is the author himself confirming that in the Wikipedia
| talk page for TIFF!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:TIFF/Archive_1#h-Source_f...
| Tempat1 wrote:
| Great find! And oh no, it's complete with the customary
| blissfully unaware user replying to say he's wrong!
| rzzzt wrote:
| Are talk pages accepted as a source for the same article?
| speedgoose wrote:
| Talk pages aren't valid sources in general. In this case
| the author is dead and an established expert having
| published in the field, so I guess it's fine, but I
| wouldn't bet.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-
| p...
| darkwater wrote:
| Hindsight is 20/20 and I loved TFA and I don't want to ruin
| it but... that comment was there from 2007 and the Wikipedia
| user bio was pretty clear since the beginning (https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Scarlsen&old...)
| svat wrote:
| Yes but it's not easy to find random Wikipedia user pages,
| or even find the specific talk page comment in the archives
| without knowing what to look for. Go ahead, find a friend,
| give them no clues, and see if they find it.
| darkwater wrote:
| Yes but the author was specifically investing over this,
| had a clue on a similar name and even edited the same
| page himself.
| svat wrote:
| I don't know what "investing over" means, but all I can
| say is (repeating myself): try it with a friend, without
| giving them the benefit of hindsight.
|
| (Very few visitors to a Wikipedia page read its talk
| page, very few of them will further look at the
| _archives_ of the talk page, let alone read every single
| comment and its corresponding commenter 's name, and in
| this case as soon as the author knew the spelling to look
| for, the rest was straightforward for them.)
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| well said svat. without laboring the point, "once you
| know - you know". until then it is like trying to find a
| needle in a haystack - and some people do not want to be
| found.
| bambax wrote:
| (Also: 42 is the answer to everything because it's the ascii
| code for *).
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Was that a happy coincidence or intentional?
| clan wrote:
| Perfectly pure happiness:
|
| "The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had
| to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose
| that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan
| monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared
| into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out.
| End of story." from the man himself[1]
|
| ...but let us not ruin a good story with the truth.
| Remember why earth was built. The "real" answer might
| then be flowing in the ether.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchh
| iker%27...
| bambax wrote:
| I think it was intentional but I don't have a source.
|
| Edit: from the other comment, it appears it was in fact
| random...
| abdusco wrote:
| > the ASCII code for h
|
| Umm. The ASCII code for h is 102 ;)
| bambax wrote:
| I don't know why or how you're seeing an h? I'm talking
| about the asterisk.
| 0manrho wrote:
| I could be wrong but the winky face leads me to believe
| theyre referencing the hunter2 password meme
| bambax wrote:
| Ah, thanks! I wasn't familiar with this meme. It is
| funny.
| jakub_g wrote:
| And interestingly, the person he replies to is taviso [0][1]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=taviso
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavis_Ormandy
| Rygian wrote:
| Based on the same algorithm as https://xkcd.com/221/
| 71bw wrote:
| 42 even shows up in the late mr. Carlsen's obituary. [1]
|
| [1]https://www.mountainviewtacoma.com/obituaries/stephen-
| carlse...
| CalChris wrote:
| I remember Steve.
| antonis-gr wrote:
| 42 is an extremely non-special number. Does anyone know if it
| appeared in the CS field before Douglas Addams "invented" it?
| layer8 wrote:
| What do you mean, non-special? 42 is the magic constant of
| the smallest non-trivial magic cube.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| It's also an integer. Who ch I pretty special when you
| consider that most numbers in nature are real.
| layer8 wrote:
| I have yet to see a number in nature.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Nature is full of them.
| slim wrote:
| *was
| gnerd00 wrote:
| TIFF indeed -- I recall the floppy disk for Mac mailed from
| Seattle with the TIFF spec printed on paper. A few weeks later,
| another graphics editor with TIFF support. I never, ever heard
| the name Carlsen until today. Thank you for this article
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| thanks gnerd
| qrush wrote:
| RIP Mr. TIFF. Hoping we continue to document these incredible
| engineers and their work before it's lost to the sands of
| time/pits of LLM muck.
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| i've interviewed 100 folks in this space, in part because they
| are older than us.
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| Beautiful and moving. Thank you author of the article and thank
| you Mr TIFF
| adzm wrote:
| I was not expecting the emotional ending. Really well done.
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| thanks upvoter
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Glad that the information was preserved in the magazines, usenet
| messages and just text files. That will not happen with the
| modern web software, the internet is the dark ages of our time.
| All those Java,Flash amazing pieces of software and the stories
| of their creators will be gone long before the internet dies from
| LLM slop.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I think of all the content we've lost already. MySpace files
| are lost. Friendster archives are gone. So many YouTube videos
| lost to time.
| oidar wrote:
| And Geocities, Vine, Google+, Anglefire, Tripod, Xoom,
| Homestead, Lycos communities, AOL Hometown, MSN Groups,
| 50megs.com, etc, etc.... not to mention small specialty sites
| like em411.com. All that content/history, just poof.
| qingcharles wrote:
| They found the Vine archives recently. Doesn't mean they'll
| get uploaded as Musk wants the new Vine to just be AI
| waifus. But the files still exist on a disk or tape
| somewhere.
|
| I just remembered Orkut. Though I suspect Google has
| backups or Orkut and Google+ somewhere. I wonder if Yahoo
| Answers is still on a tape somewhere?
| portaouflop wrote:
| I link to a lot of stuff on my personal website and every
| month i check the links. About a dozen or so are dead every
| month, many on YouTube too.
|
| I now adopted the practice of recovering the texts I deem
| worthy from way back machine and downloading all yt videos I
| really like locally.
|
| But ofc one day I'll also hit the bucket; still have to work
| out a contingency plan for my archive for that ...
| defrost wrote:
| I had exposure to TIFF files shortly after the format creation in
| 1985/86, before the final form specification in 1992.
|
| Not mentioned in either the article or the tail end wikipedia
| article iamge was the early adoption of TIFF by the mapping and
| geodetic community to store raster line data (maps, images, _and_
| raw sat and instrument platform multichannel line data).
|
| The tagging format made the embedding of spheroids, datums,
| projections, origins, lens and focal specifications relatively
| easy (plus or minus the usual Tower of Babel Tag Naming and
| Meaning Confusion).
| andrehacker wrote:
| Am I missing something ?
|
| The article is great but the web site is supposedly related to a
| book "inventing the future".. which is nowhere to be found. Other
| than a big, slowly loading graphic, 3 posts and indexes for the
| book... the site doesn't provide a clue about where to acquire
| the actual (PDF only?) book.
|
| I assume you have to sign up to find out more ?
|
| On the web I can only find articles about the book.
|
| So.. what is the deal in making the actual book hard to find ?
|
| Edit: I think I cracked the code: Click Home, Open "Close Your
| Rings" article, scroll all the way down, find link:
| https://books.by/john-buck?ref=inventingthefuture.ghost.io
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| hi andre, thanks for the feedback. there is a url link within
| the article to the book which uses a new self publishing method
| called books.by
| andrehacker wrote:
| Ah, I see, okay.
|
| Based on the quality of the article, the subject matter of
| the book being right in the center of my wheelhouse and the
| references I could find on the internet, I just ordered a
| copy (apparently a paper copy), look forward reading it.
| OisinMoran wrote:
| I had a similar issue, clicking the author's name gets you to a
| decent page, but yeah I'd actually prefer if he made it a bit
| easier to buy the book! I'll have to get it now after such a
| nice article
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| i didn't want to push the book too hard, given the tone of
| the story. thanks for the feedback.
| OisinMoran wrote:
| That makes perfect sense, you're a gent.
|
| This page [0] still links to (when clicking the main image)
| an oddish seeming corner of your site that mentions
| purchasing the book but has no link to it
|
| [0] https://inventingthefuture.ghost.io/
| scriptweaver wrote:
| It's so inspiring to see someone spend years uncovering the real
| people behind tech we use every day. This kind of dedication
| keeps our digital history alive.
| kuil009 wrote:
| nunmulnage gamdongjeogieossseubnida.
| Timwi wrote:
| Translation: "It was so moving that I cried."
| tianshuo wrote:
| Thank you John Buck for this article, it is so interesting to
| read how something so common was invented. RIP Mr Tiff
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| thank you
| Nio1024 wrote:
| Respect to those unsung engineers who made such lasting
| contributions, and to the author as well. This kind of work is
| not easy, but truly meaningful. I do have a question, though:
| shouldn't the creation of industry standards also allow
| individual attribution, similar to how patents credit inventors?
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| :) Pleased to see the wikipedia change landed without drama. It's
| still there as of writing.
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| i crossed my fingers for the first 24 hours but i now think
| admins and mod, to their credit, understand it's the truth.
| DroneBetter wrote:
| the article shows scans of the research reports listing only
| Carlsen as their author, you could have just linked to one in
| the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page to support his sole
| inventorhood, right
| burnto wrote:
| Beautiful essay. So much of the tech we use today originates from
| quiet humble builders and creators like Mr TIFF.
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| thanks for the response burnto
| csar wrote:
| Me: "This link can't possibly be about what I think it might be
| about." Me, seconds later: "Yes it is!!"
| jack1243star wrote:
| Please do not let my comment take away your enjoyment of the
| article.
|
| I hate to nit-pick on such a beautiful story but that it ended
| with a faux-Ghibli profile picture is just sad.
|
| How can someone working so hard to humanize technology and
| preserve history, justify this soul-less commodification of art?
| Do the animators deserve to get treated as anonymous model
| trainers without their consent, names and frames lost in a dead
| ocean of bit-vectors?
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| my kids made the avatar so...sorry if it triggers
| jack1243star wrote:
| I understand, and I apologize for the rant.
|
| Thank you for all the efforts that went into preserving the
| memories of those that built the world around us.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| 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 where tiles were completely one single colour
| removing the need to decompress at run time.
|
| Thank you TIFf!
| sllabres wrote:
| And the (early) availability of well made library, LibTIFF by
| Sam Leffler. I used it extensively from 1995 on, but only found
| out that according to Wikipedia is dates back to 1988!
| flomo wrote:
| Perhaps the greatest thing about TIFF, but also the most
| horrible things, and probably why TIFF is mostly historical. It
| was so extendable that no two programs ever accepted the exact
| same TIFF extensions. (omitting the war story)
|
| edit: forgot about byte order...
| yread wrote:
| But most of these variations were part of the spec
| (endianness with II or MM, later magic 43 for bigTIFF 64bit
| extension). I work with tiff and tiff-derived formats in
| digital microscopy where its very much not historical. And
| the alternatives (DICOM supp 145, vendor-specific garbage ...
| and thats it) are worse.
|
| I quite like the format, the only thing I would change is to
| have the option not to store directory information in a
| linked list spread throughout the file but in a simple array.
| Duplicate it at the beginning and end of the file and you've
| got resilience too (important in the age of floppies)
| piltboy wrote:
| TIFF is still very much alive in certain circles, see for
| example https://cogeo.org/ The format is basically a TIFF
| file with attached georeferencing information and with the
| data organized by geographical sector, enabling fast
| downloads of regional subsets.
| geokon wrote:
| I'm not super knowledgeable about this stuff.. but out of
| curiosity, what advantage does it have over NetCDF?
|
| I wrote a program processing GeoTIFF data. When I had
| started this project I chose GeoTIFF mostly b/c i wanted
| something simple. And I could load them in to Java's
| BufferImage class and manipulate them that way. But it
| seems all the pros exclusively use NetCDF and GeoTiffs are
| for noobs (working with atmospheric science data here)
|
| GeoTIFF does extend "images" to cover more usecases, but a
| lot of stuff doesn't fit (like say a wind vector) and then
| you need some other container or metadata b/c you generally
| have many images. So I get the sense the complexity just
| ends up being moved elsewhere.
| piltboy wrote:
| Generally speaking I would classify TIFF and its variants
| as imaging formats (or for very simple numerical
| datasets), and NetCDF as more suited for raw data, in
| particular multi-dimensional data with time series, etc.
|
| For forecast and climatological data I find NetCDF is
| vastly superior, but also much more complicated to work
| with due to the capabilities and how open the format is.
| Just have a look at the complexity of the CF Conventions
| to see what I mean: https://cfconventions.org/cf-
| conventions/release/v1.12.0/cf-...
|
| For visualizing orthophotos and the like, I would choose
| GeoTIFF any day of the week, as they're easy to visualize
| across platforms using existing libraries. Using COGs you
| also get the functionality of a spatial index within each
| GeoTIFF file, meaning that you can stream subsets of
| GeoTIFF files without having to scan through the entire
| file for each request.
| abram wrote:
| The Adobe DNG standard for raw camera images is based on
| TIFF as well. DNG is used in lots of places, including the
| raw capture support built into all modern iOS and Android
| smartphones.
|
| I've been using both TIFF and DNG this very week in my work
| (https://filmlabapp.com), so I was happy to read this post
| and learn about Steve Carlsen aka Mr. TIFF, whose work
| we're still building on 39 years later.
| mark-r wrote:
| Not only DNG, but I think most (maybe all?) raw camera
| files are based on TIFF.
| buildbot wrote:
| Not the .IA files from old Sinar digital backs! Those are
| based on DOOM PWADs (lol). But otherwise mostly yes this
| is true for nearly every other format as far as I am
| aware.
| omoikane wrote:
| The top 3 (Canon, Sony, Nikon) are all based on TIFF, and
| that accounts for the majority of the market share.
| Search for "TIFF-based" here:
|
| https://exiftool.org/#supported
| wiredfool wrote:
| This is why some people consider TIFF to stand for "Thousands
| of Incompatible File Formats".
| flufluflufluffy wrote:
| We have hundreds of thousands of TIFF files where I work
| which are scans of questionnaires filled out by clinical
| trial participants. The one annoying thing is that web
| browsers don't natively display them. I did some incredibly
| inefficient JavaScript bs to decode the pixel data, plop it
| in a canvas, get a PNG data url from it, and set that as the
| src for an img element xD (why not just display the canvas?
| because I was too lazy to manually handle resizes...) good
| times
| blacklion wrote:
| 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!
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Back when I was working in the book publishing industry (writing
| and typesetting computer books using Quark XPress [1] on the old
| MacOS [version 7, 8 and 9 IIRC], before Adobe's _InDesign_ [2]
| ruled the earth), TIFF was all the rage. Probably still is.
|
| I think the reason TIFF was so prevalent was it already had
| support for CMYK color space (even though many books were printed
| in black and white) and for lossless compression (as TFA
| mentions).
|
| It was a "one size fits all" format and so our 100 or 250 MB (!)
| Zip drives [3] exchanged between authors/publisher/typesetters
| often contained TIFF files.
|
| > For as long as I have published my books, one of my overarching
| goals was to give credit to those who actually invented the
| hardware and software that we use.
|
| So thank you Mr. Stephen "TIFF" Carlsen!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuarkXPress
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_InDesign
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
| flancian wrote:
| 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?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Just as a side note, there are two versions of tiff6.pdf
| (titled "TIFF, Revision 6.0, Final -- June 3, 1992") on the
| 'net: one[1] that mentions Aldus on the title page and one[2]
| that mentions Adobe. Only the Aldus one has the invisitext.
| (Curiously, the metadata says it's newer.)
|
| [1] SHA256: dbcdf729182937ecff415dfd06806894bf03bfd741291aa3ad7
| ba45335673def, modify date 2002-05-10, created by Acrobat
| Distiller 4.05 for Windows, e.g.
| https://www.itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/com16/tiff-fx/docs/tiff6.pd...
|
| [2] SHA256: 8cb1e1a2226e423ba8b88f57366a30ef1b7ad6109443ebdda07
| 2b952739a8d76, modify date 1995-09-14, created by Acrobat
| Distiller 2.1 for Power Macintosh, e.g.
| https://download.osgeo.org/libtiff/doc/TIFF6.pdf
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| b2ccb2 wrote:
| His obituary is lovely:
| https://www.mountainviewtacoma.com/obituaries/stephen-carlse...
| throw0101d wrote:
| [...] "Time flies like the wind. Fruit
| flies like bananas." "What's the answer to Life,
| the Universe, and Everything? 42."
| andrepd wrote:
| Sillepses are always great.
| quitit wrote:
| Quietly thankful that the spec author didn't proclaim that we've
| been mispronouncing "TIFF" all these years.
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| The "TI" is really "Tl" and is a voiceless alveolar lateral
| affricate.
| quitit wrote:
| I tried to pronounce it, but summoned a daemon instead
| throw0101d wrote:
| TIL:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_af
| f...
| sethx wrote:
| Beautiful
| hellojohnbuck wrote:
| thank you sethx
| emmett013 wrote:
| I see you played the NYT Connections on 11/4.
| cod1r wrote:
| Oh man, this is a really nice ending to his story. I'm glad this
| happened.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I have a habit of filling my head with all kinds of
| trivia/information. Sometimes I think this is a useless habit.
|
| Not today. I will try to remember the name of Mr. Stephen Carlsen
| as the inventor of TIFF format as long as I can. As a mediocre
| programmer, it is the least amount of respect I can pay for an
| unsung but talented engineer of an era that is fast going past
| us.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| I'll admit that the only time I ever interacted with a TIFF file
| was the buffer overflow exploit in the PSP Photo Viewer. RIP Mr.
| TIFF.
|
| https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/PSP/Homebrew_History?useskin=v...
| everydayentropy wrote:
| Nice read. It was touching and it's great that credit is given
| where credit is due now.
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