On 12/1/06, Nathaniel <spangineer(a)gmail.com> wrote:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2006/11#TIFF_….
From what I
understand, PNG's aren't all that great for photographs (or in
the
Wikisource case, scans of pages of books and other documents) and don't
work well with scanset, and JPEG's are ridiculously large for the same
amount of information as is in a TIFF. Discussion on Commons (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#TIFF_files.3F) seemed
to suggest that the real problem was image size, but again, it looks like
JPEG's would end up being bigger than the TIFF's.
PNG and TIFF are in the exact same boat in this regard. JPEG isn't
necessarily bigger, but rather we should expect objectionable
artifacts in JPEGs.
The misconception that PNGs are somehow low quality for continuous
tone images appears to be rampant in our community and it needs to be
stopped. What PNGs actually are is space inefficient, and while people
might argue that *space is cheap*, bandwidth is not and until we have
cross-format thumbnailing, size will remain a major factor in our
selection of upload formats.
We also have the worry that "TIFF" doesn't actually tell us what it
is.. TIFF is one of those generic wrappers which people can (and do)
shove all sorts of random crap into... including proprietary/patented
formats (I've seen TIFFs stuffed with Mr.SID for digital
orthophotography), although it's not that common since most things
can't read such tiffs.
At the end of the day, we'd like to be able to
store large images that are
as detailed as possible, and be able to use them for proofreading on
Wikisource.
The best format for this is dejavu, which we support, but we don't
have support for either the browser plugins or serverside
autoconversion.
The only advantage I see for tiff is that some of the browser plugins
have nice navigation abilities.. but the same is true for dejavu... if
we're going to put something up that needs a browser plugin it should
be the free software solution. Dejavu also happens to have MUCH
better compression, and it would also be an acceptable lossy solution
for photographs as well.. better than jpeg.