The TitleSearcher.com site utilizes standards-based HTML and should be viewable via any 4.0 or greater browser. Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla or almost any other modern browser should be able to view all areas of our site equally. Images of scanned documents are stored in TIFF format. TIFF is not a format which can be viewed natively inside a web browser and a "helper" or "plugin" application must be installed and configured to view them.

What is a TIFF Image?

A TIFF (Tag Image File Format) Image is a bitmap image, that means the pictures are stored as a collection of color (or B&W) dots. The advantage of the format is its size, it's really small for black & white pictures; it's easy to print and you can view the image via systems running almost any operating system.

What programs can read TIFF images?

Microsoft Windows: If you are using Windows 3.1, you can download LView Pro. This shareware program can manage bitmap images in different formats (PCX, GIF, TIFF, etc). You should seriously consider upgrading your computer if you use Windows 3.1 however, no modern web application efforts are being made in it's direction.

On PCs with Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP and Internet Explorer 4.0 or above, there is an imaging program already installed which can be used to view TIFF images. The viewer should launch within Internet Explorer and load the image automatically. Internet Explorer is available at no cost from Microsoft.

Starting with Internet Explorer version 5.5 and above Microsoft has disabled the ability to use Plugins in favor of Active-X controls. A very good image viewer for TIFF images which works IE5.5 and above is AlternaTIFF. Go to their page at www.alternatiff.com and either download the viewer as a .ZIP file to install locally or install it straight from their web site. AlternaTIFF is free for use but does require you to register with them. THIS IS THE PREFERRED METHOD FOR ALL MICROSOFT WINDOWS/INTERNET EXPLORER USERS!

Macintosh: For Macs, there are shareware TIFF viewers which can be downloaded and installed. We recommend GraphicConverter.

UNIX/Linux: All modern Unix/Linux systems come with TIFF viewing and manipulation utilities. XView has been tested to work well.

Problems?

Apple Quicktime: Quicktime is an application which integrates with a web browser to enable the viewing of audio/video clips in the Quicktime format. It exists for Microsoft Windows as well as Apple Macintosh systems. On Windows older versions of Quicktime took over the TIFF viewing functions even though it was NOT capable of viewing multi-page TIFF G4 documents properly. In this case you can view the first page of a document but NOT page forward to subsequent pages of the document. On very old versions of Quicktime you can not view one of our TIFF documents at all. You will be greeted with an icon which looks like a broken piece of filmstrip. Solution: Upgrade to a newer version of Quicktime or (preferably) install AlternaTIFF to handle TIFF viewing functions.

Swiftview: Swiftview is an application capable of viewing various image formats and is commonly installed to view plat images from some local government web sites. Swiftview can view multiple image formats but shares the problem Quicktime has. It can NOT properly view multi-page TIFF documents. During the install of Swiftview a dialog window is presented asking what types of documents you would like to associate with Swiftview. TIFF is on the list and should be UNclicked before proceeding. Solution: Too late, you've already associated TIFF images with Swiftview. Install (preferably) AlternaTIFF or de-install and then re-install the default Windows imaging components to re-associate TIFF with them. In some instances you may need to de-install Swiftview and re-install making sure to not select to associate TIFF images with it.

Printing: Once you've viewed a document on your monitor successfully, moving through the pages of the document or printing it is totally a function of your computer and image viewing software. You could disconnect from the internet at this point and still be able to print. No communications between your computer or web browser and the TitleSearcher.com web site is performed. If you can view a document properly on-screen but can not print it to paper properly then something is wrong with your computer (generally wrong printer drivers, misconfigured printer drivers, etc...). We can provide some basic guidance in resolving this type of issue but ultimately this will be something for an IT Department or computer service company to resolve.

I am using Internet Explorer 4.0 (4.01). I can't see any document images when I click on the view image button. What's wrong?