Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/11/18

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Subject: [Leica] Durability of digital files.
From: spencer at aotera.org (Spencer Cheng)
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:19:55 -0500
References: <6a7544a60911160638i4a9ee20eg432a1558ecd47c66@mail.gmail.com> <5BF64428-71E4-401C-83E2-38A99B1850E0@aotera.org> <1519BF2C-12BB-48F9-9724-741584BEA772@frozenlight.eu>
 
Hi Nathan,

PDF and TIFF are de facto standards owned by Adobe. There are several 
variants of TIFF, including some ISO standardized ones, which are not fully 
compatible. PDF I think is pretty backward compatible but it is not a 
standard. DNG is in the same boat.

JPEG is better (ISO 10918 + whatever JPEG-2000 is) but JPEG is lossy so 
there are some tradeoffs there.

Count your blessing if you can still read the Wordstar file. I would convert 
it to a more "modern" format like TeX. :)

Regards,
Spencer

On Nov 18, 2009, at 1:39, Nathan Wajsman wrote:

> But if the world settles on some standard formats like PDF and TIFF and 
> JPG, then those should be quite durable. I can still open my PhD 
> dissertation from 1991, written in Wordstar (I think) but later saved as a 
> PDF file.
In reply to: Message from lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin) ([Leica] Durability of digital files.)
Message from spencer at aotera.org (Spencer Cheng) ([Leica] Durability of digital files.)
Message from photo at frozenlight.eu (Nathan Wajsman) ([Leica] Durability of digital files.)