[PLUG] Anyone else discovered DjVu?
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at attbi.com
Thu Nov 7 16:25:41 UTC 2002
On 7 Nov 2002, Karl M. Hegbloom wrote:
> http://www.djvuzone.org/
>
> Sexy application! Perhaps it will be interesting to see how hard it
> is to turn LaTeX into DjVu...
I was listening to a conversation about this technology last Monday.
It seems like a killer document format for scanned archival documents:
DjVu docs of scans are an order of magnitude smaller than PDFs or JPGs
of the same scans.
Here's the relevant FAQ-ish paragraph:
One of the main technologies behind DjVu is the ability to
separate an image into a background layer (i.e., paper texture and
pictures) and foreground layer (text and line drawings).
Traditional image compression techniques are fine for simple
photographs, but they drastically degrade sharp color transitions
between adjacent highly contrasted areas - which is why they
render type so poorly. By separating the text from the
backgrounds, DjVu can keep the text at high resolution (thereby
preserving the sharp edges and maximizing legibility), while at
the same time compressing the backgrounds and pictures at lower
resolution with a wavelet-based compression technique.
--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at attbi.com>
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