What Document Files Do You Use?

[Ninurta]

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IMAGES: About the same as Ninurta. For photos where you have the origin source, archivist perfectionists (and all gov't libraries & most Univer libraries) usually go with .TIFF (for lossless image archiving) as it supports the CMYK color model for printing. I rarely ever use TIFF and the downside is you need massive amounts of storage space that make it cost prohibitive. Go with PNG.

BMP is bloated proprietary crap and never had a good use for it. Might as well use PNG for lossless image compression with less space consuming plus it is an established open file format, developed by the PNG Working Group.

I had forgotten about TIFFs, and shouldn't have. I've made extensive use of TIFF ("Tagged Image File format") for mapping applications, but don't make many maps any more.

The USGS puts out it's topographic maps exclusively in GeoTIFF and GeoPDF files these days. The beauty of that format for that use is that geographic coordinates and orientation can be embedded in it, making manipulation and combination easier. For example, I could download a DEM "Digital Elevation Model") for 3 dimensional relief - used mostly for map shading purposes and oblique views of an area of interest - and then directly overlay a USGS topographic map onto that surface for more complete visualizations of points of interest.

The Geo PDF files are arranged in layers, so you can turn various layers in them on or off to improve readability and reduce clutter on a map. There is also software available that will output a GeoTIFF from the selected layers of a GeoPDF so you can create your own GeoTIFFs using just the information sets you need and leaving out any other clutter.

I used to use software that could read and manipulate DEM files, Census Bureau TIGER data, and GeoTiffs, but it was a Windows-only program, so I had to stop using it when I migrated to Linux. Thee are Linux programs available (like GRASS), but they seem to be unnecessarily overly complicated and difficult to use, so I don't so much map making any more, and had forgotten about the TIFF format.

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