Paul Kaiser's Blog

Manipulating image data has been a big part of my life, both hobby and professional. Today, the Wayback Machine gave me a blast from the past, as I was able to dig up old screenshots of my Image Extractor and TIFF Tool programs.

Prepress lead to programming

I worked in prepress since the early days of “desktop publishing,” when a 32MB SIMM for your Mac was $1,200, FreeHand and PageMaker were viable and owned by a company called Aldus, and Adobe products weren’t even available for Windows. Back in those days, necessity really was the mother of invention. Some imaging challenges often made the difference between shipping a product on time or late.

AppleScript and RealBasic

That’s when Ken and I got busy with AppleScript and I built Image Extractor, and later TIFF Tool. Our TSI Graphics coworker Bill White, who has now been at Wolfram Research a number of years, introduced us to AppleScript by loaning us his copy of “The Tao of AppleScript” book. From there, we went to FaceSpan, moved development to RealBasic, and the rest of my career moved on from there.

Image Extractor – Extracting from PostScript

Image Extractor screen shots and info pages (PDF)

Image Extractor started out as a plain AppleScript, received a user-interface facelift using FaceSpan, and eventually became much faster as a compiled RealBasic cross-platform product. This was the first product I’d ever had featured in a magazine – an April 1998 edition of MacWeek.

Image Extractor user interface

Image Extractor, at the time, was the only easy way to pull embedded raster data out of PostScript, PDF, Illustrator, and FreeHand files. We used to get native Illustrator files from clients, with embedded image data, but we were unable to make changes to that embedded data. I know that sounds ridiculous — and it was — so we made Image Extractor and stopped losing days of production while waiting for clients to provide us with bitmap originals we could edit.

TIFF Tool – Learning the tags

TIFF Tool screen shots and info pages (PDF)

My next step was to provide more services to folks using TIFF files. After reading The Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats and the smaller Graphics File Formats, I became obsessed with the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF.) I built TIFF Tool originally to help me better understand the nature and capabilities of TIFF files. Later, I added editing capabilities and exporting to other file formats and PostScript.

TIFF Tool user interface

To this day, it amazes me that TIFF files aren’t used more extensively. I wonder sometimes if Adobe hadn’t been building the Portable Document Format (PDF) — PostScript’s little lean sibling — if TIFF would have been the universal cross-platform format of choice. I found it interesting that the TIFF 6.0 spec, published by Adobe, always seemed to be behind the times. Only recently have the JPEG compression abilities in TIFF files been added to PhotoShop. I wonder if Adobe now figures PDF has been entrenched long enough that TIFF poses no threat?

The future

My future is more about data mining and artificial intelligence than anything. But those early days of extracting raster data from PostScript, and of understanding the flexibility of TIFF tags, definitely provided a solid foundation for what I do now.

A few PDFs from the Wayback Machine

• 1998 MacWeek Image Extractor article
• Image Extractor screen shots and info pages
• TIFF Tool screen shots and info pages