[Pythonmac-SIG] Does PIL handle OS X TIFFs?

[Bob Ippolito]

On Wednesday, Sep 17, 2003, at 15:44 America/New_York, Tom Kacvinsky 
wrote:

> Well, libtiff handles MacOS X TIFFs.  I will talk to the
> libtiff developers about a build process to get either a
> framework or a .dylib build of libtiff, and then someone
> more knowledgable about Python (I am still a newbie) can
> take it from there, if anyone is even interested...

libtiff is used by PIL (1.1.4, with a patch that someone on this list 
gave me) to decode ccitt, group3, group4, and raw 16bit.. The one 
that's in my Package Manager distribution is compiled with this patch 
and a static version of libtiff.

The problem at hand is that PIL (even with this patch) never uses 
libtiff to read the metadata about a TIFF.  PIL's TIFF image plugin 
uses pure python code for everything but the actual codec (parsing 
header, blocks, etc.).  The pure python code is not up to date with 
regard to the latest TIFF standards, and *only* uses libtiff to decode 
the aforementioned formats (lzw, etc are handled by non-libtiff code).

-bob