Zeiss AxioVision to SGI SoftWoRx. The ZeissToSGI utility program converts from a Zeiss AxioVision TIFF file to one that can be read by the SoftWoRx software on SGI boxes.

While Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) images are common, there can be many problems using TIFF files, especially created on a variety of scientific devices. These TIFF problems resulted in some suggesting in jest that TIFF really stands for "Thousands of Incompatible File Formats."

The TIFF specification is very broad and flexible, but many software vendors do not need and do not implement all possible "tags" allowed by the specification. In this case, TIFF files created by Zeiss use a separate "strip" for each row in the image, but SGI's software expects input TIFF files to have the whole image stored as a single strip. There is also a difference in how "16 bit" data are stored within a 2-byte word of storage.

Zeiss likely was providing a flexible framework to store quite large images and only read the part that was needed. SGI, on the other hand, was expecting to process an image that could be held in memory, and didn't care about reading such large images.

The license of this software is Free, you can free download and free use this image processing software.