Re: Ridiculously Enormous PDFs and Printing
Re: Ridiculously Enormous PDFs and Printing
- Subject: Re: Ridiculously Enormous PDFs and Printing
- From: Chris Hanson <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2003 13:02:32 -0500
On Friday, August 8, 2003, at 09:14 AM, mathew wrote:
You know, if you're concerned about file size (not to mention
cross-platform and multi-software compatibility) then you really ought
to be using PNG, not TIFF.
TIFF has poor compression, and the multitude of TIFF variants (with
different algorithms and even different byte ordering) means that
there's no guarantee a TIFF file written by program A will be readable
by program B, even if both claim to support TIFF.
In the printing world, TIFF is king. Why? Because TIFF does not have
"poor compression." TIFF is a container format; the data in a TIFF can
be compressed using poor compression, compressed using very good
compression, or no compression.
Often in printing full-resolution plate files are generated. These are
one-bit images at 2400 to 3600 dots per inch. Stored in a TIFF using
CCITT/ITU T.6 Group 4 Fax compression these types of plate files can be
compressed *very* well. (Often down to 10-15MB for a full plate with
crop and trap marks etc. Group 4 Fax is a very efficient
two-dimensional run-length encoding scheme.) And there's plenty of
industry-specific software that can deal with these.
If you're just tossing around some graphics to put in web pages, or
word processing documents, or just for general user use then PNG is
fine. But if you're in the printing world, TIFF is still where it's at.
(Can QuickTime handle Group 4 Fax compression yet?)
-- Chris
--
Chris Hanson, bDistributed.com, Inc. | Email: email@hidden
Custom Mac OS X Development | Phone: +1-847-372-3955
http://bdistributed.com/ | Fax: +1-847-589-3738
http://bdistributed.com/Articles/ | Personal Email: email@hidden
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