One document format offers bookmarks, hyperlinks and indexing. The other offers tag-based image archiving options and 32-bit color depth. Which is the right format for your needs?Deciding whether to go PDF or TIFF with your documents seems like a no-brainer for many users. But there's a time and a place for both document formats. And, increasingly, companies are evaluating whether to switch to using TIFF in their document workflows.
TIFF, or tagged image file format, is a popular format for high-color depth (32-bit) images. The format was originally created by Aldus company for use with PostScript printing. Adobe then acquired Pagemaker from Aldus and now controls the TIFF specification.
TIFF hasn't changed too much since its creation, but there is an ongoing attempt to design a new variant of TIFF called BigTIFF that uses 64-bit offsets. 64-bit offsets would allow TIFF documents to grow beyond their already considerable 4-gigabyte barrier. However, this advance could pave the way for more document management possibilities.
Adobe also owns the PDF specification, of course, and that document format is flourishing with continual care, innovations, and a rosy future of perpetual upgrades.
Which is Right for You?
It depends on how you'll be using and storing the documents you've created. For the majority of users who are putting text in their documents, the PDF is hands down a better choice. It is a universally accepted format that any recipient can view using the free Acrobat Reader utility. If your primary document creation is handled in Microsoft Word, for example, you'll want to convert your finalized product into a PDF before sharing it. This ensures the file maintains the exact formatting, font and content that you choose, regardless of which version of Word your respective readers might have. It is also a much more secure file format that offers the ability to control factors such as who can read or alter your document.
You can alter a PDF much more easily than a TIFF file. Between the features available in Acrobat, Acrobat Pro and third-party add-ons, you can do several things not possible with TIFFs, such as:
• Add bookmarks, notes and highlighting without altering the original file
• Insert hyperlinks to other documents
• Index a PDF for complex searches.
PDF is also better equipped to handle multi-page documents. Each original page is displayed as a separate page within a single PDF file. TIFF supports multiple pages, but lacks important features, such as the ability to specify multi-layer relationships of different pages.
Archiving Images
But don't count TIFF out yet. TIFF is a great choice for archiving images, and may be a better choice in the long run than PDF.
TIFF is flexible, and can accommodate multiple images and information in a single file through tags in the file header. Those tags can indicate geometrical information about those images or define image compression techniques. Creative professionals also use TIFFs because the format can accommodate vector-based clipping paths, something PDF can't easily do. What's more, TIFFs can be edited and resaved with little-to-no compression loss—an important feature when using the file format for archival or data asset management purposes.
Photographers and the printing and publishing industries work with TIFF. Digital cameras typically produce images in TIFF, JPEG or RAW formats. An uncompressed TIFF can be rather large (with a ceiling of 4GB), making it impractical for Web use and cumbersome for sharing via e-mail. But you can use any color depth to define the picture with a TIFF and you can invent any new tags, or file information, that you may need.
Because the TIFF file format is based on bitmap technology it can look pixilated when blown up beyond a certain size. PDF files are based on Adobe's PostScript printer control language, which produces an image that perfectly represents the original. You can enlarge a PDF without loss of clarity.
The major drawback of TIFF is that, because it has been neglected by Adobe, it lacks standardized support for advanced imaging features that have been developed in the last few years.
Accounting for Text
Both TIFF and PDF files can be converted to text using OCR software. To save a TIFF document that has been OCRed, the software must create an external text file. This takes up time and storage, but depending on the size and number of files you are working with it can ultimately save space.
When dealing with smaller databases it is more efficient to convert a file to PDF and then OCR the PDF file. PDFs are standalone files that contain metadata and full text, whereas TIFF files must be linked to a database. The difference is that a PDF with text can be a much larger file.
"A TIFF connected to a database with OCR provides the same capability as a PDF with OCR that has been catalogued," says George Thornton, managing partner of On Site E-Discovery. On Site's clients are law firms with hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that need to be scanned into digital format, then OCRed and searched for keywords to provide evidence in a case. These databases can grow into multiple terabytes, so saving space is crucial. "When I have a large document collection I use TIFFs with a database," says Thornton. "For business purposes, I tend to send PDFs."
Document Management 
