With truly free software, you have the freedom to run the software for any purpose, to modify it to suit your purposes, to redistribute it, and to redestribute modified copies. Zero-cost software may or may not grant you any of these four freedoms. The licence for Irfanview, for example, not permit you to use the software for any purpose: you are not allowed to run it in a commercial or business setting. Neither are you allowed to modify Irfanview, nor to redistribute it.
This is interesting. I’ve been vaguely-aware in the back of my mind that TIFFs can have multiple pages, but I’ve never encountered one.
I work in a structural engineer’s office and our server contains hundreds, if not thousands of TIFFs, a large percentage of which are multi-page files dating back as long ago as 10 years.
It’s my understanding that pc-fax technology used either TIFF or PCX formats for multi-page faxes so the preference for TIFFs might date back to that. Also, I’ve found that the print shops in our area that are capable of scanning large format drawings default to TIFF. If we want PDFs, we have to specify them.
Personally, I’ll take TIFF over PDF any day since their viewers tend to be lighter on system resources, it’s far far easier to edit them with conventional graphics software and simple to incorporate them into AutoCAD drawings. That’s something I’ve never been able to accomplish with PDFs.
Gorsnak, yes, Brava Viewer can read multi-page TIFFs with no problem. I’d use that as my default TIFF viewer except it’s print function screws up on my machine. Irfanview is a godsend.
All for very good reasons. TIFFs have traditionally been the high-end bitmapped graphics files where lossy compression isn’t aceptable and editing is expected.
Acrobat PDF was developed to provide a reliable layout graphic tool that could incorporate and combine bitmaps, vectors and text, that faithfully reproduced the designer’s work on almost any kind of device, especially high-end typesetters. I began using PDFs for that purpose long ago precisely because I didn’t want anyone in the graphics publishing stream to alter my work.
There’s a little more flexibility in all formats now than before.
Don’t confuse Adobe Reader (formerly Adobe Acrobat Reader) with PDF viewers in general. The former is a slow, enormous behemoth of a resource hog which even on fast systems can take a long time to load, whereas almost every other PDF viewer I’ve used has been small and snappy.
That’s because PDFs were designed from the beginning to be a universal presentation-only format. You don’t edit PDFs; you prepare your document using whatever format and whatever tool is most suitable (a typesetter, word processor, spreadsheet, drawing program, etc.), and then you export that document to PDF to get a faithful representation of how it would look if it had been printed out. You can share the PDF with others, even if they don’t have the same program you used to produce it, and you can be assured that what they see in their PDF viewer is exactly the same as what you see.
All of what Musicat and psychonaut say about PDFs are true. You don’t want people to edit them. Whenever my own office issues official drawings and documents, we stamp and encrypt PDF files. My comments about TIFF were just an attempt to illustrate why some people or institutions would prefer TIFFs due to the nature of their work.
As for PDF readers, I agree that Adobe Reader is a bloated resource hog. I’d prefer to use Brava Viewer or Foxit but I’ve had problems with each of them with regard to printing and filling out forms.