RE: Opening TIFFs from a Browser

["Boudreaux, Madelyn" <Madelyn -dot- Boudreaux -at- wolterskluwer -dot- com>]

Sean asked some questions, so here are clarifications. 

Sean wrote:

>Not sure how you can do that. TIFF is not a Web-ready format. TIFF
>supports CMYK color for colour printing, but that image gets RGBified
>for display on screen. 

Not to worry, Sean. First, I'm not trying to display the TIFF in the
browser window; we just need to make sure that we provide reasonable
instructions for allowing a user to get the TIFF image so they can do
whatever they want with it: print, look at, whatever. Quicktime and some
other products all open the TIFF in its own window. That's an expected
and acceptable behavior. 

Mainly, I am giving them some tips to pass them off to their own
administrators in a responsible fashion: here are some programs you can
use; get your admin to install something; if you can't see the TIFF, get
your admin to figure out why; if you can't print the TIFF, get your
admin to figure out why. 

>What do you mean by "professional uses"?

Printing, dropping into a presentation, silk-screening on t-shirts,
gettin' a rad tattoo -- whatever they feel like. There are no copyright
issues with this; if they have access to the TIFFs, they have the rights
to use them as they see fit. These are primarily medical images being
viewed by doctors and clinicians, so rad tats are probably an unlikely
choice. 

>GIF supports only 256 colors and likely will struggle to faithfully
>render the colors in a TIFF. PNG supports RGB color plus transparency,
>but not CMYK. JPEG supports CMYK, but is lossy.

Not an issue. The GIFs do not generate the TIFFs. We provide them both
as distinct files generated from the original sources (medical
journals). Most users do not need the TIFF; they just look at the GIF.
But apparently some users do need higher quality versions of the
graphics, and that's who we are aiming this at. 

>Perhaps an option is to print the TIFF to PDF using a PostScript
process
>and provide the PDF online? 

Whoa. THAT muddies the water a good deal. Also, it would require a
change to the programming, which I guarantee will not happen. 

Thanks. 

- Madelyn

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