TIFF, the Prepress Format

1986

Inkjet doing its thing. Aldus releases TIFF so desktop publishers can move pages between scanners and printers. Place: Aldus Corporation, Seattle, Washington Figures: Aldus engineering team · the desktop-publishing vendor consortium · Adobe (post-1994 acquirer of Aldus and steward of the spec) Aldus Corporation, maker of PageMaker, releases Tagged Image File Format revision 3.0 in 1986. The brief: a single format that scanner vendors, prepress houses, color-separation services, and the new desktop-publishing software can all agree on. The solution is structural. A TIFF file is a header followed by an arbitrary number of image file directories, each containing tagged fields (resolution, color depth, compression, photometric interpretation, calibration data) and pointing at a strip or tile of raster data. The format supports 1-bit, 8-bit, 24-bit, 48-bit, multi-channel. CMYK. Lab. ICC color profiles. LZW was added in TIFF Revision 5.0 (October 1988), NOT in 6.0 (1992). JPEG was added in 6.0 (June 1992). Multiple images per file, multiple resolutions per image. It is, by 1992, the most powerful raster format in existence. A standard PageMaker workflow can produce TIFFs that are hundreds of megabytes.