<div>Frank,</div>
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<div>Since you have direct contact with the Adobe developers. Can you comment on whether Adobe intends to incorporate the BigTIFF import/export capability into the Adobe family of products [ie: Photoshop]? I understand that CS3 is in its beta development phase at this time.
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<div> </div>
<div>Regards,</div>
<div>Daniel Denk</div>
<div> </div>
<div><br><br> </div>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 12/21/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Frank Warmerdam</b> <<a href="mailto:warmerdam@pobox.com">warmerdam@pobox.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Folks,<br><br>GeoTIFF has been one of the most successful geospatial imaging formats since<br>it's inception over ten years ago as an extension to TIFF.
<br><br>However, the underlying TIFF format suffers from a size limit of 4GB.<br>As time passes computing resources improve, and image data quantities<br>balloon. The 4GB limitations has become an increasing problem for our
<br>industry.<br><br>In an effort to rectify this the TIFF user community on the TIFF mailing<br>list developed a specification for an extension to TIFF to use 64bit offsets<br>within a new variation of the format now referred to as BigTIFF. This allows
<br>file sizes up to 18000 petabytes, effectively infinite. This specification<br>was developed with input from a variety of sources, including users of the<br>libtiff library, representatives of Adobe (the owner of the TIFF specification)
<br>and developers of other TIFF codecs.<br><br>The BigTIFF specification has been successfully implemented in one proprietary<br>library from Aware Systems. However, the libtiff development team has not been<br>able to find the several months of development time required to implement
<br>support for BigTIFF in the libtiff library (used by libgeotiff, GDAL,<br>MapServer, etc).<br><br>Joris van Damme of Aware Systems (also a frequent contributor to libtiff and<br>the TIFF mailing list) has agreed to implement a BigTIFF upgrade for libtiff
<br>if reasonable financial support can be found for the project. To that<br>end the "BigTIFF Sponsorship" effort was launched. It is described at:<br><br> <a href="http://libtiff.maptools.org/BigTIFFProposal.html">
http://libtiff.maptools.org/BigTIFFProposal.html</a><br><br>So far we have been quite successful and have secured commitments from three<br>of four needed sponsors, each for an amount of $6000 USD towards the project.<br>
This email is a solicitation for one final sponsor for the same amount so that<br>we can launch the development project in February.<br><br>The proposal page above covers the details, but the gist is that the project<br>will result in a libtiff
4.0 circa July 2007 that will support reading<br>traditional TIFF files, as well as BigTIFF files, and will support writing<br>either variant. This capability will flow through to users of the GDAL<br>library, MapServer and libgeotiff.
<br><br>This is an appeal from me then for one additional organization in our<br>industry to step forward to support this important infrastructural project.<br><br>In addition to the technical benefits this project will bring, I believe
<br>the project press release will also bring a reputational benefit to all the<br>sponsors.<br><br>Please contact myself or Joris van Damme if you are interested in taking<br>the last sponsorship position so that we can launch the project on time.
<br><br>Best regards,<br>--<br>---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------<br>I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, <a href="mailto:warmerdam@pobox.com">warmerdam@pobox.com
</a><br>light and sound - activate the windows | <a href="http://pobox.com/~warmerdam">http://pobox.com/~warmerdam</a><br>and watch the world go round - Rush |<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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</blockquote></div><br>