DjVu is a web-centric format and software platform for distributing documents and images.DjVu can advantageously replace PDF, PS, TIFF, JPEG, and GIF fordistributing scanned documents, digital documents, or high-resolutionpictures. DjVu content downloads faster, displays and renders faster, looks nicer on a screen, and consume less client resources than competing formats. DjVu images display instantly and can be smoothly zoomed and panned with no lengthy re-rendering.DjVu is used by hundreds of academic,commercial, governmental, and non-commercial web sites around the world.
DjVu is a web-centric format for distributing documents and images. DjVu was created at AT&T Labs-Research and later sold to LizardTech Inc. DjVuLibre is a GPL implementation of DjVu maintained by the original inventors of DjVu. Get a Free Software PDF reader! The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular format to publish formatted text and documents. There are several different versions of it, some qualifying as an Open Standard, some certified by ISO and some encumbered by software patents.
DjVuLibre is an open source (GPL'ed) implementation of DjVu, including viewers, browser plugins, decoders, simple encoders, and utilities.
Native plugins for MS Windowsand Mac OS X are freely available from LizardTech Inc.The new portable viewer djview4is available as a separate package.
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DjVu (pronounced 'déjà vu') a set of compression technologies,a file format, and a software platform for the delivery over the Web of digital documents, scanned documents, and high resolution images.
DjVu documents download and display extremely quickly, and look exactlythe same on all platforms with no compatibility problems due to fonts,colors, etc. DjVu can be seen as a superior alternative toPDF and PostScript for digital documents, to TIFF (and PDF) for scannedbitonal documents, to JPEG and JPEG2000 for photographs and pictures, and to GIF for large palettized images. DjVu is the only Web format that is practical for distributing high-resolution scanned documents in color. No other format comes close.
Typical DjVu file sizes are as follows:
- bitonal scanned documents: 5 to 30KB per page at 300dpi (3 to 10 times smaller than PDF or TIFF)
- color scanned documents: 30 to 100KB per page at 300dpi (5 to 10 times smaller than JPEG).
- photos: 2 times smaller than JPEG, about the same as JPEG-2000, but the decoder/renderer is progressive and has minimal memory requirements.
- palettized images: 2 times smaller than GIF (up to 10 times if it's mostly text).
- digital (non scanned) documents: between 1 and 3 times smaller than PDF or gzipped PS (depending on the amount of pictures), but rendering, page flipping, zooming, panning are incomparably faster, and the image quality on screen desplays is much better (antialiased text, etc).
DjVu is used by hundreds of academic,commercial, governmental, and non-commercial web sites around the world to distribute scanned documents, digital documents, and high-resolution photos.
A short technical description of DjVu is available here.
Demos, and general information about DjVu can be found at DjVuZone.org,or at LizardTech.com.
DjVu was originally developped at AT&T Labs-Research.In March 2000, AT&T sold DjVu to LizardTech Inc. whonow distributes Windows/CE/Mac plug-ins, and commercial encoders.
DjVuLibre is an open source implementation of DjVu. See the credits/history page for moredetails.
A short technical description of DjVu is available here.In short, DjVu is a multipage document format that can use a number of differentcoder/decoders (codecs) to compress the individual chunks that compose animages or a page. In fact, DjVu is really four compression techniques wrapped into one format:
- DjVuPhoto (aka IW44): A progressive, wavelet-based lossy compression format for continuous-tone images (i.e. photos and pictures).
- DjVuBitonal (aka JB2): A lossless or lossy compression technique for bitonal (black & white) or palettized images that is particularly effective on images with repeated shapes (such as documents images where the same character appears many times in the document).
- DjVuDocument: A technique for scanned color document that separates images into a foreground layer that contains the text and line drawings, and a background layer that contains the pictures and background textures. The foreground is encoded with DjVuBitonal and the Background with DjVuPhoto.
- BZZ: A general-purpose data compression technique similar to bzip2. Bzz is used to compress searchable text layers and other metadata in DjVu documents.
Windows and Mac versions of the viewer/plug-in, free Windows compressors, and high-end commercial compressors and OCR engines are available from LizardTech Inc.The compressors provided here are slower, produce larger files (sometimeswith lower image quality) than the commercial compressors, but they do the job. Mellel 4 2 5.
For those who like quick solutions without having to install software, a variety of free web-based conversion services are also available, including Any2DjVu andBib2Web.
Sumatra PDF
FBReader
Cool Reader
A short technical description of DjVu is available here.
Demos, and general information about DjVu can be found at DjVuZone.org,or at LizardTech.com.
DjVu was originally developped at AT&T Labs-Research.In March 2000, AT&T sold DjVu to LizardTech Inc. whonow distributes Windows/CE/Mac plug-ins, and commercial encoders.
DjVuLibre is an open source implementation of DjVu. See the credits/history page for moredetails.
A short technical description of DjVu is available here.In short, DjVu is a multipage document format that can use a number of differentcoder/decoders (codecs) to compress the individual chunks that compose animages or a page. In fact, DjVu is really four compression techniques wrapped into one format:
- DjVuPhoto (aka IW44): A progressive, wavelet-based lossy compression format for continuous-tone images (i.e. photos and pictures).
- DjVuBitonal (aka JB2): A lossless or lossy compression technique for bitonal (black & white) or palettized images that is particularly effective on images with repeated shapes (such as documents images where the same character appears many times in the document).
- DjVuDocument: A technique for scanned color document that separates images into a foreground layer that contains the text and line drawings, and a background layer that contains the pictures and background textures. The foreground is encoded with DjVuBitonal and the Background with DjVuPhoto.
- BZZ: A general-purpose data compression technique similar to bzip2. Bzz is used to compress searchable text layers and other metadata in DjVu documents.
Windows and Mac versions of the viewer/plug-in, free Windows compressors, and high-end commercial compressors and OCR engines are available from LizardTech Inc.The compressors provided here are slower, produce larger files (sometimeswith lower image quality) than the commercial compressors, but they do the job. Mellel 4 2 5.
For those who like quick solutions without having to install software, a variety of free web-based conversion services are also available, including Any2DjVu andBib2Web.