[Coco] [Color Computer] .djvu vs .pdf revisited

[Michael Wayne Harwood]

I spent my lunch hour doing comparative tests using a demo of Lizard Tech's
"Document Express Enterprise" DjVU compressor and Adobe's Acrobat Suite
v6.0.  I have found that at very high compression levels the quality of
.djvu is much better that .pdf - unfortunately that level of compression
looks horrible in both.
 
At high visual quality levels the formats are about tied in both size and
quality.  I used two different version of source scans in the .tif (non
lossily compressed) format.  The first (hires) is the original scans at
300ppi, and the second (lores) are those same .tif files scaled to 781x1082.

 
Using the first batch of images (hires) I was able to produce documents that
looked excellent and used a little less than 1mb per page.  With the second
batch of images (lores) I was able to achieve the file size I was hoping for
(less than 180k average per page) in both file formats and the documents
look very acceptable.  At this point I see no compelling reason to use .djvu
given these reasons and the overwhelming response of people on this list in
favor of the .pdf format.
 
In my opinion the only question that remains is whether to have higher
quality images (1mb or so per page) using more DVDs or lower quality images
(160kb or so a page) using a single DVD.  I would be happy to post the files
I created, but in the interest of quicker download times perhaps someone
would be willing to post the files on a server on the other side of a faster
link than I have.
 
Regards,
Michael Harwood