Digital BW, The Print

I remember Aldus (later purchased by Adobe), developing and publicly 
publishing the specification for TIFF way back in the late 80's. It was 
a big deal back then for developers building imaging applications in 
the early days of desktop publishing as before that, to avoid licensing 
fees or litigation everyone was developing their own file format.

When photoshop first came out everyone in the digital pre-press 
industry bought a copy just to use it as a file format converter 
because it supported so many formats.

To all who have been following this thread, think what you will about 
Adobe but I have been as connected as anyone in the industry to Adobe 
since the early days of Desktop publishing, knowing and meeting with 
developers, product managers, system architects, upper management, and 
certainly sales and marketing. As well, I have know and worked with 
similiar resources at Kodak, Scitex, Creo, Agfa, Dalim, Xerox etc. And 
bashing Adobe for being proprietary, opportunistic, corporate and 
selfish is terribly far off the mark, I have to ask, compared to what? 
Maybe compared to open source. And if that is how you feel then you 
should be using open source image editors and file formats.

Of all the companies I have dealt with I have never encountered a more 
open, hard working, honest, ambitious, tenacious, disciplined, 
client-focused company.

They have done more to service and support photographers and graphic 
artists than any company in the industry. Adobe has certainly earned 
their success.

It would really make some sense for someone to actually READ the DNG 
spec and understand the nature of the TIFF formats that underly it and 
how those standards are maintained and supported before making 
assumptions about how it is all an evil plot to take over the world.

So basically Paul, I agree with you!

James Haney


On Sep 29, 2004, at 7:46 PM, Paul D. DeRocco wrote:
>>
>
> As I recall, TIFF
> was also an open standard pioneered by Adobe, so I have no reason to 
> believe
> that DNG won't remain as open as TIFF.