Howdy,

On Wed, 2009-01-07 at 08:36 -0700, Bruce Johnson wrote:
> 
> On Jan 6, 2009, at 7:36 PM, Vic wrote:
> 
> > PDF, JPG and other formats, while they might be de facto standards,
> > are still proprietary formats,
> 
> PDF is an open ISO standard, no longer controlled by Adobe; although  
> Adobe PDF's can have proprietary parts, the pdf created by, say  
> printing to PDF in OS X is not.
> 
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A>
 This is partially true.  Read the wikipedia page for some details.
There is an ISO standard for PDF files.  Not all pdf writers will write
that format.  I don't know if the current OSX will.  I am not updated to
the current version.  My OSX system does not write ISO compliant files.

> 
> JPEG is also an ISO standard, and open source implementations exist.
> 
> <http://www.jpeg.org/jpeg/index.html>
 JPEG is an open standard, but not every program that writes jpegs will
write fully compliant jpeg files.  If long term archival of files is
important to you, check that the program you use is a good
implementation.  Jpeg is likely to be supported for many years, but you
have to decide if the images are good enough quality.

...
> TIFF is recommended as the best, not because it's an open standard,  
> but because it's about the only widely used lossless image standard.  
> JPEG is lossy.
> 
 There are lots of varieties of TIFF files.  It and PNG are the most
common lossless formats available.  I prefer PNG for most of my usage,
because the compression algorithm in TIFF files is patent encumbered,
which limits some program's abilities to handle TIFF files with
compression.  For simplicity, I can see how it might be a better choice
for some people to stay with TIFF files.  Before you embark on a major
archival effort using TIFF files, find out what type of TIFF files you
are going to write and be consistent so your entire library will always
be readable by the same program.
Good luck,
Ralph



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