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DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT - STANDARDS
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File Format Standards
We have seen that images may have many different attributes associated
with their capture: resolution of the scanner, color/gray scale,
com-pressed or uncompressed, single or multiple images per file,
etc. Image file format standards allow application software to
know these characteristics of the stored image so as to facilitate
their extraction and rendering into human recognizable form. The
most popular format is a de facto format developed by Aldus, known
as TIFF, which stands for Tagged Image File Format.
With emerging color-imaging systems JPEG is increasingly used
by many imaging vendors due to its very attractive file compression
capability.
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Device
Driver Standards
In an effort to better integrate image technology into desktop
applications, TWAIN has been promulgated as a standard software
mechanism for applications to access scanners. Using TWAIN,
applications may embed scan functions in windows menus in
much the same way as print services, fax services and mail
services are embedded today. In order to use TWAIN, one needs
a TWAIN compliant scanner as well as a TWAIN-compliant application.
A relatively new entry into this foray is Pixel Translations'
1515 (Image and Scanner Interface Specification), which has
become a public domain de facto standard providing a comprehensive
set of application programming imaging standards. In some
respects, 1515 competes with TIFF, in that it provides descriptive
formats for the attributes of the captured image, but 1515
goes beyond TIFF in also providing a messaging based set of
APls for other utilities such as format translation from PCX
to TIFF, for example, as well as image manipulation primitives.
By separating the application programmers from some of the
drudgery of image handling, applications can be developed
more quickly and by utilizing the same set of primitives,
applications can become inter operative.
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