TIFF production

Why anyone still does this

Because an image is inert. A native spreadsheet recalculates when it opens. A native Word document carries its revision history and author metadata. A PDF can hold a live hyperlink out to the internet. Once a document has been imaged, what the other side sees is exactly what you sent, permanently, and every page carries the same Bates number it did when you stamped it.

That predictability is why imaged production became the default in the era when review platforms were built, and why production protocols still specify it long after the platforms stopped requiring it.

What a TIFF production actually consists of

Rarely just images. The usual delivery is:

• Page images, historically single-page TIFF — one image file per page.
• A load file mapping images to documents and carrying the metadata.
• Extracted text, one file per document, which is what makes the production searchable in the receiving platform.
• Selected natives, because some file types are useless as images.

That last one is the standard carve-out. An imaged spreadsheet loses its formulas and usually runs off the page; most protocols require spreadsheets and presentations to be produced natively even in an otherwise imaged production.

Email-specific problems

Imaging email is not imaging scanned paper, and three things bite:

Pagination is generated. The page count comes from whatever rendered the message, so a set imaged by different tools will not be internally consistent.

Threads duplicate. A quoted thread contains its own earlier messages, so imaging every message in full images the same content repeatedly, and the receiving party pays to review it repeatedly.

Colour is often material. Bitonal imaging destroys tracked-change markup, highlighted text and colour-coded cells pasted into a body. Where the protocol allows colour for relevant documents, email is frequently a place to use it.

Is it still necessary?

Often not. Many platforms now ingest PDF happily, and producing PDF skips the imaging step and the split-to-single-page work entirely. It is worth asking at meet-and-confer rather than assuming, because the specification you are working from may simply be the one the firm has always used.