What is a TIFF ?

Tagged Image File Format - TIFF

The TIFF/IT file format
     TIFF/IT is a standard for the exchange of digital adverts and complete pages. TIFF/IT files only contain bitmap data, no vector data. The files are not rasterized (although they could be) but they contain 256 graylevels per channel. TIFF/IT is the abbreviation of Tagged Image File Format/Image Technology.
     As the name indicates, TIFF/IT is based on the well known TIFF standard. Because the TIFF/IT standard is very flexible, a subset of the standard was devised that is called TIFF/IT P1. P1 is limited to CMYK jobs. It does not support spot colours. When most people talk about TIFF/IT, they refer to the P1 version. A P2 version is worked on right now.
     TIFF/IT has only been successfull in some market like the exchange of adds for newspapers or magazines and the exchange of pages for magazine printers.
     A number of companies selling TIFF/IT related products have announced products in which TIFF/IT data are ecapsulated in PDF files. This merging of these two formats, with PDF offering wide industry support and TIFF/IT's proven track record of reliability, is one of the more interesting evolutions in prepress today.

The history of TIFF/IT
     The history of TIFF/IT starts around 1989 when DDAP (the Digital Distribution of Advertising for Publications Committee) asked ANSI, which is the American National Standards Institute, to define a standard for the exchange of digital adverts.
     ANSI has its own subcommittee that deals with graphics arts and this committee, called CGATS, decided to start with the development of a standard for the exchange of raster data. They planned to add another file format for vector based data later on.
     CGATS took the TIFF file format as a starting point. The most current version of the TIFF specs is still version 6.0, defined by Aldus way back in 1992.
     In 1996, the specifications of TIFF/IT were finalised. TIFF/IT was a very open and powerful format that left a lot of room for developers to handle things in different ways.

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