djvu - Newspaper, Magazine, media archives online (webware?)

P

*ProteanThread*

Better than PDF ?


http://www.djvuzone.org/wid/index.html

Over 90 percent of the information in the world is still on paper. Many
of those paper documents include color graphics and/or photographs that
represent significant invested value. And almost none of that rich
content is on the Internet.

That's because scanning such documents and getting them onto a Web site
has been problematic at best. At the high resolution necessary to
ensure the readability of the text and to preserve the quality of the
images, file sizes become far too bulky for acceptable download speed.
Reducing resolution to achieve satisfactory download speed means
forfeiting quality and legibility. Conventional web formats such as
JPEG, GIF, and PNG produce prohibitively large image files at decent
resolution. As a result, Web site content developers have been largely
unable to leverage existing printed materials.

DjVu (pronounced "déjà vu") is a new image compression technology
developed since 1996 at AT&T Labs to solve precisely that problem. DjVu
allows the distribution on the Internet of very high resolution images
of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. DjVu allows
content developers to scan high-resolution color pages of books,
magazines, catalogs, manuals, newspapers, historical or ancient
documents, and make them available on the Web.

Information that was previously trapped in hard copy form can now be
made available to wide audience.
 
Q

Querulantus

*ProteanThread* said:
Better than PDF ?

Not quite comparable really. PDF is a document format. You can recover
text from a pdf file.

Djvu has been around for quite a while, but never caught on, for one
reason or another. The compression ratio looks very impressive though,
so one wonders?

Querulantus
 
Q

Querulantus

"*ProteanThread*":
Better than PDF ?

I had a closer look at it and it's quite interesting. The compression
is astounding. I downloaded the browser plugin, which works in IE and
Gecko based browsers, but there appears to be a bug: the mouse pointer
kept disappearing off the screen when I viewed DjVu documents or
pictures in either installed browser.
Secondly, there is freeware to make PDF's, but I haven't seen any
freeware to make DjVu's.
I uninstalled the plugin and shall await further developments and
improvements.

Q.
 

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