RFC 2302 (rfc2302) - Page 2 of 8

Tag Image File Format (TIFF) - image/tiff MIME Sub-type Registration

RFC 2302                          TIFF                        March 1998


     Adobe Developers Association
     Adobe Systems Incorporated
     345 Park Avenue
     San Jose, CA 95110-2704

     Phone: +1-408-536-6000
     Fax:   +1-408-537-6000

   A copy of this specification can also be found in:
   ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/devrelations/devtechnotes/pdffiles/
   tiff6.pdf

   While a brief scope and feature description is provided in this
   section as background information, the reader is directed to the
   original TIFF specification [TIFF] to obtain complete feature and
   technical details.

 2.1 TIFF Scope

   TIFF describes image data that typically comes from scanners, frame
   grabbers, and paint- and photo-retouching programs. TIFF is not a
   printer language or page description language. The purpose of TIFF is
   to describe and store raster image data.  A primary goal of TIFF is
   to provide a rich environment within which applications can exchange
   image data. This richness is required to take advantage of the
   varying capabilities of scanners and other imaging devices.  Though
   TIFF is a rich format, it can easily be used for simple scanners and
   applications as well because the number of required fields is small.

2.2 TIFF Features

   Some of the features of TIFF (from [TIFF]) are:

    - TIFF is capable of describing bilevel, grayscale, palette-color,
      and full-color image data in several color spaces.

    - TIFF includes a number of compression schemes that allow
      developers to choose the best space or time tradeoff for their
      applications.

    - TIFF is designed to be extensible and to evolve gracefully as new
      needs arise.

    - TIFF allows the inclusion of an unlimited amount of private or
      special-purpose information.






Parsons, et. al.            Standards Track