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on PC's and the PICT format on Macintoshes); whilst others are          [PP18]
specific to particular software environments (e.g Microsoft Windows
.BMP format and GEM's VDI/.img format).

To facilitate the ready exchange of images between different types of hardware
and software, a number of standard graphics formats have been developed. The
two most significant are TIFF (Tagged Interchange File Format) and GIF
(Graphics Interchange Format). TIFF was originally created by Aldus and
Microsoft. It is an evolving standard, designed to represent a superset of
existing image file formats. TIFF is supported by most high end graphics
applications. GIF is a popular 8 bit colour format created by Compuserve in
1987. Both TIFF and GIF store images in compressed form. GIF images can be
further compressed via conversion to the 'lossy' JPEG (Joint Photographics
Expert Group) format.



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