[Coco] Rainbow archives in DjVu

[Bob Devries]

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.

--
Regards, Bob Devries, Dalby, Queensland, Australia

Isaiah 50:4 The sovereign Lord has given me
the capacity to be his spokesman,
so that I know how to help the weary.

website: http://www.home.gil.com.au/~bdevasl
my blog: http://bdevries.invigorated.org/

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Teunissen" <deek at d2dc.net>
To: "CoCo List" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 4:04 PM
Subject: [Coco] Rainbow archives in DjVu


> For the past week or so I've been putting together a system for converting 
> the
> Rainbow scans on excalibur1 to DjVu format; specifically, one that doesn't 
> use
> the 'pdf2djvu' program (which basically sucks for anything more than the
> simplest "I want this PDF to be smaller" needs). The 'cpaldjvu' program 
> might
> have worked, but it doesn't seem to be all that controllable and I would
> rather finish the project within the expected lifetime of the universe (it 
> is
> just a tad slow :) ). Luckily, I've come up with something using bash and 
> the
> GIMP that seems to do the job pretty well.
>
> My processor is currently reducing the size of the files to about 10% 
> their
> original size (ex: the Jan 1992 issue has slimmed down from 103,045,775 
> bytes
> to 9,180,533 bytes -- a 300dpi scanned page usually compresses down to
> somewhat less than 200K). Plus, unlike pdf2djvu, it manages to separate 
> the
> page content from the page itself, which is what allows big compression
> without reducing the resolution of the actual text.
>
> A side effect of being able to split up each page into the different 
> layers is
> that Google's "Ocropus" software can really do a great job on making the
> magazines searchable/indexable (and the OCR'ed text can be inserted right 
> into
> the document very easily).
>
> Anyway, is this something that I'm doing just for me, or is there wider
> interest around here?
>
> Note: I wouldn't consider this a complete substitute for having the 
> full-size
> scans out there somewhere; there are almost certainly better ways to do 
> what
> I'm doing, and future versions of djvulibre should allow them to be
> re-compressed with better methods allowing even better compression and/or
> display. It's just that DjVu uses a LOT less memory and displays MUCH 
> faster.
>
>
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