Our County Registrar of Deeds has started making recorded documents available, for a state-mandated fee, thru email. The only file format available is TIF.
I just requested a 6 page document and was emailed a single TIF file. Opening it in a graphics editor (Photoshop 7 or Corel Photo-Paint 7) shows only the first page. The Clerk says all pages are in there.
When I ask the Clerk what program to use to view it, she says, “Just open it in your computer. Everyone else is able to read it just fine.” What program do you use? “I don’t know.”
So is there a free TIF viewer available that handles this kind of file on a PC? So far, Majorgeeks.com and download.com have not supplied anything that works without insisting on a $ upgrade.
I work with TIF files at work all the time, and they open in something called (I think) Windows Document Viewer on my laptop, which I believe is installed as part of Microsoft Office. It even has a panel on the side where you can see thumbnails of all the pages in the file.
MS Office doesn’t come free with a computer; it’s a big extra cost. However, I’ll give Open Office a try, and thanks, johnpost, I’ll try irfanview, too.
Wasn’t able to install Open Office on this computer after two tries, and since I don’t need it for anything else, it not worth trying any more.
Installed Irfanview without a hitch after rejecting all the “free” comeons, and it was able to open and print all pages of the TIF file.
I have frequently used TIF files for decades for art purposes, but I never knew it could store multiple pages before this. It’s pretty weird that the state would select this kind of file when PDF is obviously the best choice, but it will probably be 10 years before they wise up.
Me neither, that’s why I was thrown for a loop when I got this file. Apparently they can be multiple images, but older graphics programs won’t be able to get past page one.
It’s not just older graphics programs. TIFF is such a versatile format that even most modern programs do not support all its features. Its versatility was also its doom.
Also, TIFF was designed to be used by scanners. That’s probably why all the blueprints are in TIFF files. They never bothered converting them.
Blueprints I can see – TIFF has a non-lossy compression option, and works well where quality is important. But the files I had to work with were text (legal documents), just scanned in, and done in the last 5 years. Apparently the County Registar is following orders from the state HQ to use TIFF, which is odd, since most other govt docs – national and state – have been in PDF for years.
I agree that the part I bolded is really strange. The only thing I can think of is that they don’t know how to make a PDF without OCR, meaning it would have real text. And they don’t want you copying text for some reason.
Also, I want to clarify on my previous post: When I say TIFF is doomed, I mean doomed to be a format only used in a few situations, rather than a widely used competitor to GIF, JPEG, and PNG. It could have been the only image format if they’d scaled back the features.
documents that are publications to be distributed in volume and available as bound hard copy might also be available electronically as PDF. governments records might only be available as archived TIF files.
Just IMHO, but I think it’s because of the rigid government mind-set. Some departments work only with themselves and accomodation with the public, common conventions or “outsiders” is not on their menu.
Another example is our County GIS mapping dept. Getting a JPG image out of them is difficult, as they use some very esoteric, GIS-specific format and don’t understand what anyone would want a JPG (or for that matter, TIF) file. I had this problem a few short years ago when I wanted electronic copies of the high-res publicly-available aerial photos. Couldn’t get JPG, TIF, BMP or PDF, and had to settle for a disk with some odd (to me) format that could only be read by an ancient single-format reader they had me download. It was really slow and had no conversion options. I finally printed out the images I wanted and scanned them.
We use a program called Brava Viewer for looking at blueprint tiffs in our office. There’s a free version. Not sure if it will see multiple pages or not. It’s got some nice zoom features that make it easy to look at bigass blueprints on smallish screens.
Others have mentioned Irfanview, which is zero-cost, but if you want a program that’s truly free, you could try GIMP, a bitmap graphics editor, or Okular or Evince, which are both just document viewers. They all handle multi-page TIFFs splendidly.