TIFF Inventor

John Buck tells the story of Mr TIFF:

[…] TIFF, built initially as an image standard for desktop publishing. TIFF was able to store monochrome, grayscale, and color images, alongside metadata such as size, compression algorithms, and color space information. […] But I couldn’t find a TIFF creator. No matter how I enquired, Aldus created TIFF.

In search of which invidual(s) invented TIFF. Desktop publishing needed a standard image format, and TIFF was created for that, so that scanner vendors would adopt it instead of each having their own format.

This is the story of tracking down the engineer who invented TIFF, as the spec was always credited to Aldus Corporation (later Adobe Systems). His name was Steve Carlsen.

TIFF is still widely in use, even though not on the Web where JPEG and PNG have been prefered from the get go.

Previously: PageMaker