re tiff complexity anyone who thinks that tiff is too complex hasn t dealt with cgm asn cda dca sgml or any one of a number of other very successful file format people seem perfectly capable dealing with these others dealing with the format of tiff is frankly less difficult than dealing with the dct lzw and fax encoding of the image data the majority of the libraries which deal with tiff are dedicated to these other issues rather than with simply decoding the tags and parameters perhaps people are overwhelmed in comparison with some rather simpleminded formats such as gif pcx and bmp but to suggest that tiff is so complex as to be doomed to failure is ludicrous that doesn t mean that gif isn t fine but don t even thing about using it in many instances gif is very nice for use in low end photos applications and for screen grabs and such but it would never do for high volume or high resolution systems fax is nice but it doesn t do color and gif doesn t do b w all that well jpeg is nice for high resolution color but is slow for low end the advantage tiff brings to the table is its ability to handle all these situations and then some naturally it s more complex but i ld rather propose tiff imaging solutions over imaging systems based on having to deal with file formats anyday you may find that tiff is too complicated for your personal tastes but please don t wrail against it s complexity the complexity it contains is required to provide the functionality it does and doesn t come close to the complexity found in most commercially viable file formats if we re in philosophical arguments against complexity let s all go program in scheme and forth and do imaging with run length encoding
