re tiff philosophical significance of in article prestonm cs man ac uk prestonm cs man ac uk martin preston writes why not use the pd c library for reading writing tiff files it took me a good minutes to start using them in your own app i certainly do use it whenever i have to do tiff and it usually works very well that s not my point i m philosophically opposed to it because of its complexity this complexity has led to some programs poor tiff writers making some very bizarre files other programs inability to load tiff images though they ll save them of course and a general inability to interchange images between different environments despite the fact they all think they understand tiff as the saying goes it s not me i m worried about it s all the other assholes out there i ve had big trouble with misuse and abuse of tiff over the years and i chalk it all up to the immense and unnecessary complexity of the format in the words of the tiff spec appendix g page g capitalized emphasis mine the only problem with this sort of success is that tiff was designed to be powerful and flexible at the expense of simplicity it takes a fair amount of effort to handle all the options currently defined in this specification probably no application does a complete job and that is currently the only way you can be sure that you will be able to import any tiff image since there are so many image generating applications out there now if a program or worse all applications can t read every tiff image that means there are some it won t some that i might have to deal with why would i want my images to be trapped in that format i don t and neither should anyone who agrees with my reasoning not that anyone does of course ab
