[Coco] Rainbow archives in DjVu

[Tim Fadden]

This format has been around at least 7 or 8 years probably longer.   I 
only ran into it in one place that I wanted files to view. Why not stick 
to the standard?
Personally I wouldn't do anything that reduced the image quality of the 
rainbow pdf's.  Why use another format?  I guess cause it never became 
popular or generally used,  Kinda like the coco. :-)

To,




Sean wrote:
> Sounds really interesting.  I definitely want to take a look at the new format.
>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 2:00 AM, Jeff Teunissen <deek at d2dc.net> wrote:
>   
>> Bob Devries wrote:
>>     
>>> The question in my mind is:
>>>
>>> Do I need to download yet another file viewer to be able to read these
>>> files? I've never heard of this file format before.
>>>       
>> You would, yes, but this is one viewer you're likely to be using a lot in the
>> future; now that there's a free software (GPL) version of the viewer and
>> libraries, the format is being used for all kinds of things.
>>
>> For example, Google are using it in their project to digitize all the world's
>> books, and the Internet Archive (<http://www.archive.org/>) are using it to
>> store public-domain printed works of all kinds, mostly because of the huge
>> advantages DjVu has over other formats when it comes to scanned texts. The
>> technology is used to put out many "magazine on disk" collections, like
>> Rolling Stone's. Mike Haaland's abortive "Rainbow on Disk" project was also
>> going to use the (semi-proprietary at the time) format.
>>
>> In particular, PDF is especially lousy for scans. It's great for stuff that's
>> made of text, but when you're starting out with a picture of a page, PDF might
>> as well just be a somewhat worse replacement for a .zip file. DjVu lets you do
>> a lot more.
>>
>> DjVu lets you split up a page into multiple layers and add invisible text
>> blocks and hyper-links to what is basically a picture, so you can do nifty
>> stuff like search for a word or sentence in a scanned document without
>> changing its form. That is, you can add links from the table of contents to
>> the page an article begins on, from one page to another (so you can continue
>> reading an article that has ads in the middle of it), from one issue to
>> another (the indexes in the anniversary issues could link directly to the
>> articles they reference), without converting the whole shebang out of the
>> format we knew and loved. And since DjVu has web browser plug-ins and Java
>> viewer applets, someone could set up a Web site where people could browse the
>> whole collection without downloading any huge files. After all, if a full page
>> is only 200 kilobytes, it may just use less bandwidth that way.
>>
>> I'll be doing a lot of the work anyway, because I can't in good conscience
>> keep those giant 200+MB Rainbow scans around. Especially when I can have
>> almost the same quality in a tenth of the HDD space and even less time and RAM
>> used to display them -- where PDF takes 10 seconds, DjView is taking half of
>> one second. My only real question is whether or not anyone else wants them too. :)
>>
>>
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>>     
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