Back in 2000 when I started becoming more intense about scanning documents I was told by many people that TIFF files were preferable to PDFs, mostly because the business-class scanners were configured for TIFF output. Once I discovered PDFs, I found them preferable in many ways. Still, there are many people (mostly vendors) who argue for TIFFs. The other day I was sent a white paper comparing the two formats, and I think it nicely sums up the advantages and disadvantages of each format.
The quick and dirty conclusion: PDFs can do a lot more than TIFFs (security, searchability etc), but sometimes PDF files wind up being a little bigger. But, with digital storage costs plummeting each year, this is not a major deficit. Obviously, I prefer PDFs. Otherwise this blog would be called "TIFFs for Lawyers."
Ernie, one thing the white paper doesn't address is which format is best for presentation at trial. In my former life doing trial presentations, TIFF was far superior to PDF when showing documents to a jury -- the trial presentation software allowed you to zoom in to a particular portion of a document and annotate it any way you like. I know that many of these presentation tools will now show PDF files, but it's simply a lot easier to manipulate a TIFF when you're showing it to a jury, or judge.
Posted by: Tom Mighell | November 14, 2008 at 10:55 AM
To promote our Solid PDF Tools product, we produced this comparison table snapshot showing what we believe to be the advantages of PDF/A over TIFF (and over regular PDF) as a format for archiving documents. I think many of the same advantages apply to presentation and, using Acrobat, annotation and zooming in are no problem for PDF/A.
http://www.soliddocuments.com/info.htm?product=SolidPDFTools&id=233&frame=2&subject=CreateTIFFtoPDF
Posted by: Michael Cartwright | November 17, 2008 at 12:48 PM