Request: DJVU viewer [resolved]

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webfork
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Re: New Category Suggestion 2

#16 Post by webfork »

Hydaral wrote:
Wikipedia wrote:The ownership rights to the commercial development of the encoding software have been transferred to different companies over the years, including AT&T, LizardTech, Celartem and Caminova.
This only concerns the encoding though, not the viewing.
That's sort of why I split up the thread. The request for a viewer and issues related to the DJVU format are (mostly) separate issues.
Hydaral wrote:I think it will probably be up to LibreOffice to show the general public what this format can do.
I can't find anything that LibreOffice is going to support DJVU.
carbonize wrote:I disagree with the Microsoft reference. WMA is actually a pretty decent audio format and Silverlight is better than Flash for many things.
Hydaral might be referring to criticism of Microsoft's WMA marketing and their embrace, extend, extinguish strategy.
carbonize wrote:As to why most portable audio players do not support OGG Vorbis that is partly down to power usage. I can't remember exactly why, possibly the catalogue size, but OGG files require more power to play.
Sometimes, yes. What you're talking about hardware decoders. If a processor doesn't have to run to decode a data source and instead its a dedicated chip, that saves electricity. One exists (http://wiki.xiph.org/Vorbis_Hardware), but obviously not all devices that support ogg have an ogg decoder built in.

Strictly speaking, many devices don't even have an MP3 decoder. Instead, processor companies have been trying to integrate this capability, so hopefully ogg encoding will be integrated into the processor the way MP3 has been going. It may have already happened, I don't really know.

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#17 Post by carbonize »

I've not checked in a few years but I seem to remember that in the blind tests the differences between the four main formats (MP3 encoded with LAME, OGG, WMA and AAC) was pretty small. The only real difference is the file sized produced and given how cheap storage is these days that's not as much of a sticking point as it used to be.

There was a glimmer of hope for Vorbis when the original HTML audio and video tag specs stated they would both use the OGG codecs but then Apple complained and now we have four different vieo codecs being used. Hopefully the new WebM codec produced (taken over by) Google will become the defacto standard.

I think PDFs main problem is the same problem MP3 and Flash both have and that is they were created many years ago and have been added to and added to over the years creating a Frankenstein.

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#18 Post by Hydaral »

webfork wrote:
Hydaral wrote:I think it will probably be up to LibreOffice to show the general public what this format can do.
I can't find anything that LibreOffice is going to support DJVU.
I wasn't referring to any specific statement that they were, it's just that who else is going to get it out there? LibreOffice seems to be the logical choice.
webfork wrote:
carbonize wrote:I disagree with the Microsoft reference. WMA is actually a pretty decent audio format and Silverlight is better than Flash for many things.
Hydaral might be referring to criticism of Microsoft's WMA marketing and their embrace, extend, extinguish strategy.
Again, I wasn't referring to any specific statement by MS, or their audio format in particular. It's just something that I have noticed that MS does: Flash > Streamlight, ODF > OOXML.
carbonize wrote:I've not checked in a few years but I seem to remember that in the blind tests the differences between the four main formats (MP3 encoded with LAME, OGG, WMA and AAC) was pretty small. The only real difference is the file sized produced and given how cheap storage is these days that's not as much of a sticking point as it used to be.
You just stated the proof right there. For a given bitrate, eg 192kb/s, all the files will be the same size, but the difference in audio quality should be apparent, your example was just a different method: same audio quality, but the file size was smaller for the better formats. I have personally done my own blind tests (blindly hitting random in a MP3 and OGG mixed playlist, same song, same encode bitrate) and found that I could hear the difference every time.

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#19 Post by webfork »

PortableApps put up a fully GPL'd DJVU viewer: http://portableapps.com/apps/office/evince_portable . Will also open a few other similar document formats including TIFF, PostScript, and DVI.

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#20 Post by tproli »

STDU Viewer?
Sorry if it was mentioned earlier but I couldn't find it in neither threads.

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#21 Post by webfork »

tproli wrote:STDU Viewer?
Sorry if it was mentioned earlier but I couldn't find it in neither threads.
I didn't mention it because that program is free for non-commercial use only, which is fine but most uses of DJVU are likely to have some business/for-profit aspect. Additionally, for a mostly open document format, the lack of an open source Windows viewer seemed a little odd.

Despite that, you're right that the program wasn't listed in this thread, and it obviously should be. Well done.

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#22 Post by webfork »

Old thread update:

Sumatra also supports the DJVU format. I don't know how long that's been the case.

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#23 Post by SYSTEM »

webfork wrote:Old thread update:

Sumatra also supports the DJVU format. I don't know how long that's been the case.
That feature was added to Sumatra PDF at version 1.6 (May 30). (Few days later I rewrote the description. Mentioning DjVu support was the main reason.)
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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#24 Post by webfork »

A related question: does anyone know a method to search a collection of DJVU files? I've got a few 100 PDF files I was interested in converting but I don't want to make it more difficult to find information and my search program of choice (DocFetcher) doesn't yet support DJVU. I'm assuming if large organizations and libraries are using DJVU over PDF, there's got to be a way.

This is all i could find:
http://qa.mythicsoft.com/questions/471/ ... djvu-files

... might ask the DocFetcher folks about this if I can't find anything.

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#25 Post by webfork »

Old thread update:

I was pleased to see that calibre (and by proxy TEBookConverter) support DJVU ... sort of :
DJVU support is only for converting DJVU files that contain embedded text. These are typically generated by OCR software.
... so you'll still need to either run an OCR program or convert it to something else (avoid PDF http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.htm ... s-problems) if there's no embedded text.

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#26 Post by webfork »

Old thread update: DjVu's primary pull for me was around it's use in libraries but I recently spoke to a woman who works in a massive library who indicated that they use TIFFs almost entirely on the back-end. Users still get PDFs but only because of a conversion system in place when someone requests a file. When you're dealing with thousands (or in some cases millions) of documents, you need the smallest format.

This information makes me think that some projects I've seen over time will send you a variety of formats but – regardless of your request – it might be that all coming from a TIFF.

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#27 Post by SYSTEM »

webfork wrote:Old thread update: DjVu's primary pull for me was around it's use in libraries but I recently spoke to a woman who works in a massive library who indicated that they use TIFFs almost entirely on the back-end. Users still get PDFs but only because of a conversion system in place when someone requests a file. When you're dealing with thousands (or in some cases millions) of documents, you need the smallest format.
TIFF is unlikely to be "the smallest format". A more likely reason to use TIFF is that it's lossless, i.e. it stores scanned documents with highest possible quality.
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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#28 Post by Midas »

TIFF is the default choice for any technical digitization projects. I have done a few, and is common to get two copies of each image, a lower-res JPG for previewing and a very high-res TIFF for archiving...

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#29 Post by smaragdus »

I have an old camera and its lossless format is not RW2 but plain TIFF and the output images are huge.

For e-books I prefer DJVU to PDF, for me DJVU offers better readability.

When searching for e-books I always try to avoid PDF, I get PDFs only when the book is not available in EPUB, DJVU, FB2 and MOBI formats. I also avoid proprietary AZW (all the variants) and LIT formats.

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Re: Request: DJVU viewer

#30 Post by webfork »

SYSTEM wrote:TIFF is unlikely to be "the smallest format". A more likely reason to use TIFF is that it's lossless, i.e. it stores scanned documents with highest possible quality.
Right but I'm suggesting that all the other stuff that comes with a DJVU doc (like text, layers, form info, etc.) just takes up extra space. According to the wikipedia page, DJVU has lossless settings and can handle very high resolution documents.

Anyway, a good point to clarify on. Small is the wrong word.

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