RFC 1314 (rfc1314) - Page 2 of 23
A File Format for the Exchange of Images in the Internet
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1314 Image Exchange Format April 1992
1. Introduction
The purpose of this document is to define a standard file format for
exchange of black and white images using the Internet. Since many
organizations have already started to accumulate and exchange scanned
documents it is important to reach agreement about an interchange
file format in order to promote and facilitate the exchange and
distribution of such documents. These images may originate from
scanners, software, or facsimile (fax) machines. They may be
manipulated by software, communicated, shared, duplicated, displayed,
printed by laser printers, or faxed.
This file format provides for the uniform transfer of high quality
images at a reasonable cost and with reasonable speed whether these
files are generated by scanners, totally by software (e.g., text-to-
fax, bitmap-to-fax, OCR, etc), or by fax. Also the intent of this
document is to remain compatible with future moves to multi-level
(i.e., gray-scale), higher resolution, or color images. The format
proposed here is supported by both commercially available hardware
and commercial and public domain software for most popular platforms
in current use.
The file format for images is a totally separate issue from how such
files are to be communicated. For example, FTP or SMTP could be used
to move an image file from one host to another, although there are
complications in the use of SMTP as currently implemented due to file
size and the need to move binary data. (There is currently a
proposal for removing these limitations from SMTP and in particular
extending it to allow binary data. See reference [1].)
One major potential application of the communications format defined
here is to allow images to be sent to fax machines using the
Internet. It is intended that one or more separate companion
documents will be formulated to address the issues of standardization
in the areas of protocols for transmitting images through the
Internet and the issues of addressing fax machines and routing faxes.
Just as the exchange format is separate from the transmission
mechanism, it is also separate from how hosts store images.
This document specifies a common exchange format; it does not require
a host to store images in the format specified here, only to convert
between the host's local image storage formats and the exchange
format defined here for the purpose of exchanging images with other
hosts across the network.
This standard specifies the use of TIFF (Tagged Image File Format,
see below) as a format for exchange of image files. This is not a
specific image encoding, but a framework for many encoding
Katz & Cohen