Your answer is about as I expected, but I thought I would ask here of all the much more knowledgeable PPS minds. They are valid tiffs, I used Notepad+ to trim everything past the first image, then clipped the first 44 characters, and ended up with a valid image.

As far as getting the company providing the data, they have been less than helpful in providing any information about what other companies do in making these type of statements, so I'm doubtful they will change just for me. It looks like, barring additional information from them, that I will whip a script up that will split these apart and name them usefully to work from the XML.

Thanks for your help!

Hi Chris,

I've tried downloading the .xml files form your dropbox, but I've looked at them, and I can't seem to see the garbled data that you're talking about. One xml contains a link to an image, the other contains references to fields, not the actual data.

Am I missing anything?

can you explain in more depth? so we take off the first 44 chars, and how do you know when the image ends?

i can see that the xml includes an image number, and find that within the file as well.

if you tell me how you do it manually then i'm pretty sure a script can do the same..

I had missed this myself previously, but the XML actually contains the start point and character counts of the image within the blob.





So it actually looks a little easier, scripting-wise, than I had previously thought, although it would still be nice if it could all be done within PPS.


--Raphael--
I think you are missing what has been said....
The .img file is a group of tiffs that have been placed all together within 1 file and having header information specific to each tiff. The XML does *not* contain the actual tiff. The XML DOES refer to the file, and the location of the image within the .img file.

i was going to ask you what the other nodes were for. but with that info it is indeed 'easy' to solve. though i don't see PPS ever supporting such a file format(s), even why it should.

the extension .img historically has to do with floppy disks, now CD images and i guess this format was just made up for a particular custom/ proprietary application.

it would have far been better if the creators had opted to create multi-page tiffs, and simply referenced a particular page number within the xml instead of all those instructions, what were they thinking??

anyway, at least you now know exactly what to do, that makes me happy