DjVu

DjVu (ˌdeɪʒɑːˈvuː , like French "déjà vu") is a computer designed primarily to store , especially those containing a combination of text, line drawings, indexed color images, and photographs. It uses technologies such as image layer separation of text and background/images, progressive loading, arithmetic coding, and lossy compression for (monochrome) images. This allows high-quality, readable images to be stored in a minimum of space, so that they can be made available on the web. DjVu has been promoted as providing smaller files than PDF for most scanned documents. The DjVu developers report that color magazine pages compress to 40–70 kB, black-and-white technical papers compress to 15–40 kB, and ancient manuscripts compress to around 100 kB; a satisfactory JPEG image typically requires 500 kB. Like PDF, DjVu can contain an OCR text layer, making it easy to perform copy and paste and text search operations. Free creators, manipulators, converters, web browser plug-ins, and desktop viewers are available. DjVu is supported by a number of multi-format document viewers and e-book reader software on Linux (Okular, Evince, Zathura), Windows (Okular, SumatraPDF), and Android (Document Viewer, FBReader, EBookDroid, PocketBook). The DjVu technology was originally developed by Yann LeCun, Léon Bottou, Patrick Haffner, Paul G. Howard, Patrice Simard, and Yoshua Bengio at AT&T Labs from 1996 to 2001. Prior to the standardization of PDF in 2008, DjVu had been considered superior due to it being an in contrast to the proprietary nature of PDF at the time. The declared higher compression ratio (and thus smaller file size), and the claimed ease of converting large volumes of text into DjVu format, were other arguments for DjVu's superiority over PDF in the technology landscape of 2004. Independent technologist Brewster Kahle in a 2004 talk on IT Conversations discussed the benefits of allowing easier access to DjVu files. The DjVu library distributed as part of the open-source package DjVuLibre has become the reference implementation for the DjVu format.