Subject: Reading ACS TIFF files w/o Unix

From: "DR. CHRIS D. BODEN" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 93 19:03 BST

Dear Netters, 

	In response to the questioner who asked about reading Group 4 fax
comrpessed TIFF files, it is possible to do this on a Windows PC using the
shareware program Graphics Workshop for Windows (produced by Alchemy
Mindworks, I believe). This is an excellent program in that it allows the
offending TIFF files to be converted in the background as batches - handy 
for those synthetic papers with several dozen pages of supplement attached.
There is a wide choice of output formats, including GIF, which should suit 
most peoples' needs. 

	As an aside, the program seems to work fine (if rather slowly) on 
an 80286-based machine - this suggests that it should be compatible with 
Soft PC + Windows running on a Macintosh (and, for that matter, with WinOS/2
and maybe even WABI). Alas, Henry Rzepa appears to be correct in his post 
complaining of a dearth of native Macintosh programs which can handle this
format, at least as far as shareware is concerned - in addition to JPEGview 
and GIFconverter the current version of Bitmap-to-EPS also chokes on it.
I suspect the thinking behind the choice of this rather nasty format was
to minimise the amount of storage space used - compression ratios are 
much higher than Packbits or even LZW compressed TIFF. For instance, the 
GIF files produced by converting this format are 2.5-3x larger than the 
originals.
 
	Hope this is of use.  

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Dr Chris D. Boden           |  Tel +44 602 513525
Chemistry Department,       |  Internet : [email-masked]
Nottingham University,      |  ---------------------------------------
University Park,            |  There can be no twisted thought without
Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK.     |  a twisted molecule. -- R. W. Gerard    
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