🚀 go-pugleaf

> I have now had two separate individuals complain to me about the
> apparent non-standard TIFF format coming out of NeXTstep
> applications.

The problem usually isn't that the NeXT is generating
non-standard TIFF.  The problem is that the TIFF standard is
soooo complex very few applications on other platforms implement
it correctly.  (I haven't seen the TIFF 6.0 spec, but the 5.x
spec was about 60 pages long!).

The one case where NeXT TIFFs are somewhat unusual is for TIFFs
containing alpha.  Make sure that you save WITHOUT alpha when you
want to import a TIFF on another machine.

> One was a Macintosh user who used Scan-X to scan an image into
> a TIFF file and move it first to Photoshop (which worked fine)
> and then to Pagemaker (which appeared as gibberish). The second
> person was involved in medical imaging on Sun's and NeXT's,
> though I don't know the specifics.

> Anyone have any advise or explanation?

Since every Mac application must implement the TIFF spec
individually (there is no support in the Mac operating system,
unlike NeXTstep, for reading and writing TIFFs) it isn't
surprising that it works some places and not others.  As I said
above, make sure there's no alpha channel, and try using TIFFs
that are 1-bit or 8-bit grayscale, some applications don't like
2-bit grayscale images (which are fully supported by the TIFF
standard but not common outside the NeXT community).

Blake