With all the changes and rapid advances in IT, many of our clients raised initial concerns about future readability. At sds Property, we take this seriously. All our systems are written with 'open architecture' within the parameters of Microsoft compatible systems.
However, for the important data (the scanned images) we use non-proprietary image and text formats. As the examples of word processors show, documents saved in WordStar, old WordPerfect or even old MS Word are already difficult to read. Since each word processing company uses proprietary formats for their documents, getting the latest software to read old formats can be a frustrating or expensive task. The same applies in document scanning. The non-proprietary formats available for storing document information are few, but stable. ASCII has been a standard for text information since 1963, and has become a basic building block for practically every program involving text.
TIFF has been used as a standard, non-proprietary graphics format since 1981. It is widely used to transmit document information by imaging systems, fax machines and other software. Given the prevalence of ASCII and TIFF, our clients feel comfortable that no matter what new changes occur in the future they will be able to retrieve their data.
In addition to the raw tiff files, the sds Group convert to the industry standard document type of Adobe Acrobat PDF Files. sds Property products should never be at variance with changes in your corporate IT policy. All scanned images are created initially as Group IV Tiff files and can actually be converted to any format you like (GIF, Bitmap, DXF, PostScript and so on). We can guarantee that all future scanning will be compatible with that which we have already undertaken.
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