How To Build a TimesMachine (nytimes.com)

necro81 writes: The NY Times has an archive, the TimesMachine, that allows users to find any article from any issue from 1851 to the present day. Most of it is shown in the original typeset context of where an article appeared on a given page — like sifting through a microfiche archive. But when original newspaper scans are 100-MB TIFF files, how can this information be conveyed in an efficient manner to the end user? These are other computational challenges are described in this blog post on how the TimesMachine was realized.

Comments

Re:TIFF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't there another format that would be better than TIFF? How about TGA? :p

TIFF can use Group IV compression on monochrome images, whereas TGA is limited to RLE.