[Okular-devel] KDE4 image MIME type issues {was: TIFF file issues}

[James Richard Tyrer]

James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> Andreas Hartmetz wrote:
>> Am Donnerstag 13 Dezember 2007 19:19:31 schrieb James Richard Tyrer:
>>> I find that:
>>>
>>> Thumbnails/previews don't work for TIFF files in Dolphin and Gwenview.
>>>
>>> Okular is one of the defaults for TIFF files, but it won't open them.
>>>
>>> Gwenview will display TIFF files but zoom isn't available.
>> I just wanted to add that TIFF is reportedly a difficult and complex format. 
>> Look it up on Wikipedia. It may be that you just have exotic TIFF files, or 
>> that some exotic feature broke somewhere in the stack from libtiff up to KDE 
>> and nobody noticed because the feature is being used very little.
> 
> Although ImagMagick says that the image is just a JPEG compressed TIFF, 
> the problems appear to be specific to the image.  I opened it in GIMP 
> and saved it as a JPEG compressed TIFF and that new image does work.  So 
> mystery partially solved.  Still don't know why KDE3 doesn't have any 
> problems with it -- same image and same TIFF library.
> 
Now filed as a bug:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154698

The problem turns out to be that I received the image with the wrong 
extension.  IIUC, MIME types in *NIX are not supposed to be based on the 
file extension but rather on the contents of the file.

So, the problem is that although KDE3 applications have no problem with 
a JPEG image with the extension 'tif' that some KDE4 applications do.

This may be just a small issue with a KDE library, or it may be a 
consequence of the Okular architecture.

-- 
JRT