How can I open .xtf files?

Thank you!

Your references to Sonar confirm my suspicion that something quite strange is going on here. I had already gathered that .xtf files were used in hydrographical studies: as the Wikipedia page says "XTF is the most commonly used format for this type of information in the hydrographic survey industry. XTF supports sources including sidescan sonar, shallow seismic and multibeam bathymetry, as well as associated position and altitude information."

But these files are found on the website of the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, as part of the catalog entry for a digitised book, of which they contain (presumably) digitised images - in fact the links to the files are on a line labelled with the Chinese word 影像 yingxiang, meaning 'images'. Why would anybody use an .xtf file for such a purpose?

Here is the relevant line:

影像204000082001-0-0.TIF ; 204000082002-0-0.TIF ; 204000082003-0-0.TIF

As you can see, the names of the files are given on the page with the .TIF extension. But when I clicked on the first one, I got a downloaded file 11.5 MB in size, named 'image.xtf'. (If I change that to .tif the file is rejected by Preview as inoperable).

So I am wondering if the downloaded files are mislabelled, and there is some kind of (compressed?) image file that has an extension that differences by a single letter from .xtf. Does anybody have a suggestion I could try?

Thanks for looking into this, and for taking so much trouble!

I think that my best recourse is now to write a message to the library people who run the site in question, who have had the generosity to make their rich holdings of Chinese imperial palace archives available to researchers, and who (presumably) actually want researchers to be able to open the files they put online.

It is clear from the replies I have had on this board that even users with a reasonably high technical level find this situation mystifying. I don't think that the library in question can have intended to make things as difficult as they appear to be!

Eventually a colleague at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan sent me two .exe files (each one corresponding to a different way of encoding Chinese character). I was in mainland China at the time, and a Chinese colleague who is a PC user volunteered to try them out on a couple of the .xtf files. The files opened to display a control panel that showed one page of the document at a time, and despite the fact that the character encoding on their machines could not show them the characters on the control panel buttons, they managed to copy the images of a number of pages and send them to me. (Really fascinating stuff for people who study the kind of thing that interests me.)

I am now ordering an up to date version of Windows to use with my Parallels desktop so I can do the rest myself!

Thanks to all those who tried to help with this problem!

Nope. My aim was not to study .xtf file format for its own sake, but to find a way to open these files so as to pursue my research on the documents they contain. That was my 'quest'.

I've now found a way to do that, so I am satisfied.

Try this - may not last:

204000033001-0-0.TIF

The problem is that these files are accessible to me because I have registered with the library in question, so I don't think I can do that. Thanks for trying to help, though!