[Coco] DjVU

[Michael Wayne Harwood]

I have done some looking at DjVU and I am impressed!  Everything I want to
do with .pdf can be done as well with DjVU but there may be a price to be
paid for the format's youth....

The LizardTech "Document Express" suite has a price comparible to Adobe's
suite (around $350).  That's not cheap...  I am currently using my work
copy of Adobe's Acrobat v6.0 to do some tests, but I do not personally own
a copy  of my own.  I haven't found freeware tools that have the same
feature set as the commercial product so I have been figuring on saving up
to purchase the v7.0 suite, but at a comparible price the DjVU suite might
win.  I wish the evaluation version of document express was online so I
could play with it.

There is an open source suite of DjVU utilities
(http://djvulibre.djvuzone.org/) but they state:

"The compressors provided here are slower, produce larger files (sometimes
with lower image quality) than the commercial compressors, but they do the
job."

I have downloaded the Libre DjVU tools and plan to do some side by side
quality and feature comparisons - it may be that the freeware tools are
good enough to beat the commercial PDF authoring tools...that would be
nifty!  Nifty is good...

I will keep you up to date as I have more information.

Regards,
Michael Harwood